Friday, November 30, 2012

One Big Hole

Did you see this headline the other day?

Astronomers Find Biggest Black Hole Ever.


Let me guess...it is roughly the mass of 16 trillion one dollar bills and is located in Washington D.C...

2 comments:

  1. sounds like the straight line to another Michelle punch line.

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  2. Unfortunately I don't have anything funny to say about this. O sure, I could stretch and make Wookie jokes, but frankly this sort of "Science!" article is one of my particular pet peeves.

    The truth, and I do mean capital-T Truth here, i.e. the Fact is that they have not "found" the biggest black hole ever. Not even close. Nope, they've calculated that there "must" be one based upon a (IMHO repeatedly and thoroughly falsified) theory that attempts to explain why what they SEE does not at all match what their gravity-only calculations SAY they should see.

    In other words, this "biggest black hole ever" is actually, factually, the biggest calculated kludge they've had to come up with in order to avoid reevaluating their hallowed theory.

    I kid you not.

    There is another force out there, one we understand a great deal better than we do gravity, one which scales from the sub-atomic to the inter-galactic, and one we can experiment with in the laboratory and reasonably extrapolate the results to span the heavens.

    It is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. That's a Trillion times a Trillion times a Trillion times a Thousand. Also, its strength decreases linearly with distance, whereas gravity's influence decreases with the square of distance.

    You know it as "Electricity".

    Although, I've got to admit, Keln has the right of it in assuming that Washington's trying to make a financial event horizon even as we speak.

    I had an awful lot more to say on this subject, but just found out that there's a 4,096-character limit to comments, so consider yourselves lucky!

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