I have noticed that many theoretical physics stories that are upvoted to the front page, have no comments for much longer than other stories, and fewer comments overall. I wonder if this is because people simply don't know about the subject matter enough to create discussion, possibly fear of being wrong, or uninterest in the discussion.
I think it's more of a lack of interest. I myself find these stories very interesting, but I'm a physics student instead of an engineering/comp-sci student.
Even as a non-physics-major, stories like this tend to be terribly lacking in meat. The article says almost nothing about the topic: only a general description, without any technical information or exactly what the theorized effect on Hawking radiation is.
As a hacker, a story that says "scientist invents/discovers new thing" is completely uninteresting to me unless it actually makes an effort to explain the new thing. If it does little more than state the discovery/invention, it's news, not science, and can't teach me anything.
This isn't my field at all, and to be honest I have a very shaky understanding of what's communicated in the article. I find it extremely interesting, though my lack of knowledge leaves me with little to say.
Most of the time when I read the comments of physics articles like this, it's to find criticism that I myself have no chance in hell of producing.
I know a li'l bit of physics, so I'll add my two cents. Most such articles (including this one) are overly hyped. While the findings might be interesting to another theoretical physicist working in the same area, it's a long while before such things are of any relevance to the public... for the calculations might have mistakes or subtleties; quite possible since people don't understand things fully and we're trying to discover new physics.
With regards to the actual feasibility of such a test, let me say this: It's taken us about half a century to "probably" identify a couple of black holes. Trying to find a few that were created early enough to be evaporating now and then observing their radiation signature seems to be an extremely long shot. The article also claims that the method needs "enough" black holes, which I'm guessing is more than a few. We're talking of things which occur on astronomical time scales. Since our current technology lets us look only in our near neighbourhood (in space and time) i.e. not too far away and not too far back in time, we need to be extremely lucky to be able to verify that claim. And that would be an understatement.
PS: Hawking radiation is a semi-classical calculation of how black holes must radiate. So pretty much everybody working in related areas knows that the exact radiation observed will be slightly different due to corrections coming from "quantum mechanics done right". That's nothing new. This paper gives one such scheme of corrections and claims that this is a distinguishing feature of loop quantum gravity. (As stated in the article; I can't verify that claim)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadAs a hacker, a story that says "scientist invents/discovers new thing" is completely uninteresting to me unless it actually makes an effort to explain the new thing. If it does little more than state the discovery/invention, it's news, not science, and can't teach me anything.
Most of the time when I read the comments of physics articles like this, it's to find criticism that I myself have no chance in hell of producing.
With regards to the actual feasibility of such a test, let me say this: It's taken us about half a century to "probably" identify a couple of black holes. Trying to find a few that were created early enough to be evaporating now and then observing their radiation signature seems to be an extremely long shot. The article also claims that the method needs "enough" black holes, which I'm guessing is more than a few. We're talking of things which occur on astronomical time scales. Since our current technology lets us look only in our near neighbourhood (in space and time) i.e. not too far away and not too far back in time, we need to be extremely lucky to be able to verify that claim. And that would be an understatement.
PS: Hawking radiation is a semi-classical calculation of how black holes must radiate. So pretty much everybody working in related areas knows that the exact radiation observed will be slightly different due to corrections coming from "quantum mechanics done right". That's nothing new. This paper gives one such scheme of corrections and claims that this is a distinguishing feature of loop quantum gravity. (As stated in the article; I can't verify that claim)