Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by adgjlsfhk1 on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:48AM (#31354127)

GR and quantum field theory don't work together, so at least one of them is wrong, and it would be good to figure out which and how.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by perardi on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:59AM (#31355204)

so at least one of them is wrong

This is a semantic nitpick, but I don’t think it’s useful to think of these theories as “wrong”. They are both models that make predictions about physical phenomena that, when tested, are extremely accurate. They provide incomplete and inconsistent predictions of what happens at the very edges of physical reality, and they need reconciled.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by ckosidows on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:56AM (#31354243)

You're saying this team has proven neither of them wrong in that their findings agree with GR, is that correct? Essentially, nothing new has been learned about these two theories?

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by colechristensen on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:38AM (#31354868)

GR and QFT essentially have to meet at black holes and this is where you’d expect to find an anomaly with ought to help open doors to new physics, but what we see here is that this observation seems to still obey GR just fine and a a closer look will be necessary to find any anomaly.

It might just not be possible to see anything odd without having a black hole right there to study, but there’s always hope that the next new observation will provide a clue as the previous ones repeatedly have not.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by markus_zhang on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:50AM (#31354150)

Thanks. Can you please point me to some popular science article that explains why the two do not agree with each other?

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by tzs on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:08AM (#31354442)

Here are a few that might help:

https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-einstein-and-quantum-mechanics-...

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_time

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/387/a-list-of-in...

For a good general source if you want to learn a lot more from a good popular science point of view (but one that takes great care to not accidentally mislead by oversimplification as often happens with popular science) about general relativity and quantum mechanics, try PBS Space Time, especially after Dr. Matt O'Dowd took over as host and main writer.

https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by rootbear on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:57AM (#31354265)

Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" does a very good, completely non-technical, job of explaining the conflict between the two theories. It then goes on to explain why String Theory is one possible solution to the problem.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by zeven7 on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:12AM (#31354500)

There's also a Nova documentary version if parent would prefer to watch something: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/the-elegant-universe/

I'll add an additional recommendation: Stephen Hawking - The Theory Of Everything

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by markus_zhang on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:02AM (#31354329)

Perfect! Thank you.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by boschnix on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:34AM (#31354812)

I liked Sean Carroll's take on this with Steven Strogatz in the recent episode of Joy of Why.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/where-do-space-time-and-gravi...

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by GoblinSlayer on Thursday May 12, 2022 @01:05PM (#31356835)

tl;dr they don't conflict with each other, they conflict with a third assumption that particles have zero size. GR suggests they would be black holes, and those have mathematical difficulties. String theory is an attempt to model particles of finite size and thus eliminate black holes.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by jeremyjh on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:11AM (#31354484)

Why would that matter at this scale ?

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by dotnet00 on Thursday May 12, 2022 @10:19AM (#31354609)

Black holes are extreme enough to be one of the places where both can matter.

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Re:Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the h... by jeremyjh on Thursday May 12, 2022 @05:42PM (#31360468)

Scale was not the right word - maybe I meant distance or resolution. Does QM make a prediction that could be falsified at this resolution?

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