Let’s Imagine

Imagine your daily, sometimes dull experience as you are rotating on the surface of the Earth which orbits the sun which orbits within the galaxy. Imagine that you sense gravity and time passing, you see light, you touch the Earth, you feel the wind, you see the lightning, you hear the thunder, you touch the rain, you taste the matter that touches your lips.

Now, let’s imagine that you are orbiting 3959 miles from a black hole at a speed of approximately 1000 miles per hour through space atop an accretion of Earthen matter that is orbiting with you. Imagine that black hole is expelling jets of smaller black holes from its poles at thousands of miles per second, orbiting over your head and into the other pole, protecting you within sort of an electromagnetogravitational(I made that word up)  wormhole in spacetime. Imagine the first black hole is orbiting another black hole 93 million miles away at speeds of 60,000 miles per hour. Imagine the larger black hole and you are orbiting a “galactic center” black hole at 220 miles/sec through space at the same time. Now imagine that the larger black hole is also expelling and exchanging micro black holes with your black hole and they are orbiting around and through you and coalescing at speeds of hundreds and thousands of miles per second, actually up to the speed of light and radiating low energy black body radiation such as photons. Imagine that those black holes forming “strings” around you are creating gravitational, thermodynamic, electromagnetic and low energy nuclear transformations, which our senses perceive as “life” on “Earth”. You also then realize the missing 95% is right here with us, you had just not turned on your sixth sense, or quantum sense.

From “Bekenstein-Hawking entropy” by Jacob D. Bekenstein

Black hole entropy counts the number of states or excitations of a fundamental string.

Strings in string theory have a variety of excitations, so there is a multitude of string states. Therefore, a string has entropy, which turns out to be proportional to its mass. This is quite in contrast with black hole entropy. However, an argument by Bowick, Smolin and Wijewardhana (1987) suggests that by adiabatically (i.e. sufficiently slowly) reducing the string coupling constant g , it is possible to shrink a black hole’s size as well as to reduce its mass (while keeping its entropy constant) until eventually it gets to be the size of the string length scale ls when the black hole should not be distinguishable from a string. At the corresponding value of g , string and black hole entropy are quite similar (see e.g. Zwiebach 2004). This has been taken to mean that there is a one-to-one correspondence between black hole and string states, where both entities have the same entropy (Susskind 1993). This picture has been corroborated in the context of five-dimensional extreme black holes (Strominger and Vafa 1996). Hence black hole entropy can be understood in terms of string entropy.

Godspeed.

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References
Copyright 2012 Stewart D. Simonson All Rights Reserved