Question on Quantum Singularities and Hyperspace

[Patrick Degan]

It is possible to create an artificial quantum singularity?

Theoretically you might be able to manufacture a black hole by focussing a laser into a very tight volume of space and just keep dumping energy into the beam. At some point, the building energy density will surpass the point where Einstein's famous equation reverses and the resulting mass collapses into a singularity. A science writer named Adrian Berry discussed this possibility in a book he wrote in the 1970s, titled The Iron Sun. One of the subjects addressed in the book was the idea of manufacturing black holes as part of a wormhole construction project to link star systems together on travel routes.

Whether you could actually pull this off in reality, however, is another question entirely.

[Arrow]

Here's a thought: the mass of a nucleus is the sum of the masses of its protons and neutrons plus the energy used to hold the protons and neutrons together. Now assuming you could increase that energy, it might be possible to force the nucleus to collapse in on itself, once you overcame neutron degeneracy. This would give you a singularity with very little mass, but it would get the job done. All that would be needed to this would be a good understanding of the strong force, I think.

[Zoink]

How small can one get

The smallest anything can get is about one plank length. Beyond a certain point classical relationships are no longer valid and the idea of volume becomes meaningless in the "quantum foam".

This is equal to about 1.6 x 10e-35 m or about 10e-20 times the size of a proton.

[Arrow]

So basically any matter with dimensions less than one plank unit would have infinite density?

[Zoink]

So basically any matter with dimensions less than one plank unit would have infinite density?

I'm no astrophysicist, but my understanding is that:

Things like length, volume, density are meaningless beyond this point, because you are simpy talking about relationships between vibrating strings, or nodes (depending on what theory you are using). You are now working on a system of relationships between this strings/nodes; relationships that give rise to what we percieve as matter, energy, space, gravity, time, etc. You are in a very alien realm were you are defined by what colour you are (quantum chromodynamic theory), or how you vibrate, etc.

[The Nomad]

If tachyons existed I'd think that they would be massless

IIRC tachyons' mass is a multiple of square root of -1 ( Hamilton's number i, with i²= -1 ).

Real mass, not 0 : bradyon, can't travel with speed greater or equal to c
Mass=0 : luxon, travel at c in the vacuum.
Imaginary mass : tachyon, can't travel slower than c or at c

From Saxton's website IIRC...

[Durandal]

Actually, more equations and less technobabble would be nice.

Really? Equations for what, exactly? I mean, if its bullshit physics, coming up with equations would be hard. It takes alot of brain power to come up with good equations to explain physical properties..

Not true. It's hard to come up with correct equations to explain physical properties. I could derive E = mc² for you right now, for example. Watch ...

If every mass has a certain amount of equivalent energy, then the equation representing that relationship will involve the object's mass and some constant. The units for energy are kg*m²/s², so the constant must have the units m²/s². Therefore, the constant must be some velocity squared. The best constant to use would probably be c. So, E = mc². Off to the lab to test ...

The tricky parts come in when you've got constants like 1/2 or 2 in front of the equation (KE = (1/2)mv², for example). You could derive the kinetic energy equation based purely on units, but you'd always be off by a factor of 1/2, which is why it was derived as the integral of momentum.

The Nomad: How did you get the superscript 2 (²) to appear in your posts? I quoted your message to see if there was some special code you used, but it appears to just be another character. Is there some special key combination for it?

[kojikun]

Durandal, if youre on a windows machine, hold down the Windows button and hit "r" then type "charmap". This gives you a character map of every font, including special characters and the keystroke, for super script 2 the keystroke is ALT+0178. Hold down ALT then type 0178 on the NUMBER PAD not the number keys above the letters. You get ². ALT+0179 gives you superscript 3 (³). Oddly, the people that made these maps didnt make them consistant, so there are few fonts with superscript 4-9. :\

theres always hope for the <sup> command! LOL

[NecronLord]

In sci-fi, something is considered "realistic" if the mathematics work out, even if there is no mechanism that can conceivably get the job done.

By that token, quite frankly, a device which magically converts arbitrary pieces of matter to energy is considered realistic. And compared to macroscopic natural wormholes, it is (in fact, that's what a black hole does naturally).

So, as silly as it sounds, you could have a sci-fi starship where the garbage chute feeds the reactor, and pretty much anything (solids, liquids, etc) that you shove in there will work. It's really no sillier than artificial gravity, which we all take for granted.

Ah ha. Further validation of my universe.

[Durandal]

Durandal, if youre on a windows machine, hold down the Windows button and hit "r" then type "charmap". This gives you a character map of every font, including special characters and the keystroke, for super script 2 the keystroke is ALT+0178. Hold down ALT then type 0178 on the NUMBER PAD not the number keys above the letters. You get ². ALT+0179 gives you superscript 3 (³). Oddly, the people that made these maps didnt make them consistant, so there are few fonts with superscript 4-9. :\

theres always hope for the <sup> command! LOL

I'm on a Mac. But, given that my display font obviously supports the superscript 2, it'll be pretty easy for me to find the proper key combination.

[Sriad]

Here's some black hole stuff:
1- Black holes convert matter to energy via Hawking radiation at 100% efficiency. That's right, 100. This has to do with quantum stuff. Using all that energy on your part is another matter. Black holes are also very good at giving you energy via dropping stuff into them; while stuff is in the accretion disk it is superheated and can convert over 40% of its mass into energy. (My actual understanding is that the black hole loses the mass converted into energy by gravity and then reclaims that mass when the infalling matter passes the event horizon, but I could very well be wrong.) A third way to get energy from black holes is by converting their angular momentum ('spin') into energy, but I don't want to get into the specifics of that here.
2- Black holes evaporate via some hideous equasion, but what it works out to is basically this: you can calculate the life time of a black hole in seconds by dividing its mass in tons by 1000 and cubing the reasult. That means that a 1e15 ton mini-black hole takes 1e36 seconds to decay, and a 1000 ton quantum black hole converts its entire mass into rediculously hard radiation in one second.

So yea, you could use a black hole to power a ship, and it's one of the most realistic far future type power sources in sci-fi. You'd need it to be very small so that it gives you energy at a respectable rate, and it would need to be charged so you could contain it magnetically.
The biggest problem you'd face would be feeding matter back into it. A 50,000 ton black hole is unimaginably small, and you'd need to feed .4 tons of matter to it per second to avoid a runaway decay. There are plenty of other problems to work around, but I'm done writing now.

[Patrick Degan]

Black holes evaporate via some hideous equasion, but what it works out to is basically this: you can calculate the life time of a black hole in seconds by dividing its mass in tons by 1000 and cubing the reasult. That means that a 1e15 ton mini-black hole takes 1e36 seconds to decay, and a 1000 ton quantum black hole converts its entire mass into rediculously hard radiation in one second.

Hawking's equation, as given in Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out:

tL = 1E-28M^3

Where tL is lifetime in seconds and M is mass in grams. According to that formula, the minimum mass for a quantum singularity to enjoy a lifetime of one second would work out to 2150 metric tons.

The biggest problem you'd face would be feeding matter back into it. A 50,000 ton black hole is unimaginably small, and you'd need to feed .4 tons of matter to it per second to avoid a runaway decay.

In the discussion about Romulan starship design elsewhere on the Forum, there was inevitably an examination of the quantum singularity power source. At the time, I had observed that the smallest quantum black hole which could be sustained for any truly useable length of time would be one massing 670000 metric tons (measuring 9.9E-17cm. in radius), which would take a year to evaporate through Hawking decay. A constant matter feed of 21.26 g/sec would be sufficent to counterbalance the decay rate and maintain the singularity's mass. A quantum singularity of this size should produce the equivalent power of a 52000TW nuclear reactor, assuming 100% efficency of course. The ultimate question of course is how much of that could be effectively harvested by the energy collectors aboard the starship.