Are Black Holes All Shaped Like Doughnuts?

Are Black Holes All Shaped Like Doughnuts?: Black holes appear to have several different kinds of shapes. The unified model posits that the reasoning behind this is not that they are shaped differently, but that the perspective we're seeing them from shifts.

Hubble bubble may explain different measurements of expansion rate of the universe

Hubble bubble may explain different measurements of expansion rate of the universe:  One way to determine the Hubble constant... is based on measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation... can also be derived from the movement of galaxies near the Milky Way, movement largely due to the expansion of the universe. "When you compare the results from the two methods, there is a deviation of about 9 percent..."

...The bubble describes regions of the universe where the density of matter falls below the cosmic average. "Until now knowledge of our cosmic neighbourhood has been too imprecise to determine whether or not we are in such a bubble", continues Dr. Marra. "But let's just assume for a moment that our Milky Way is located in a Hubble Bubble. Matter outside the bubble would then attract nearby galaxies so strongly that they would move more quickly than average. In this case we would measure a higher Hubble constant that would apply to our cosmic neighbourhood, but not to the universe as a whole."

Universe May Contain “Tardis-like” Regions of Spacetime, say Cosmologists — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium

Universe May Contain “Tardis-like” Regions of Spacetime, say Cosmologists — The Physics arXiv Blog — Medium: ...the entire accelerated expansion thing could be an optical illusion created by regions of space that are bigger on the inside than they look on the outside...


Lavinto and co then calculated what our Universe would look like if it contained Tardis regions. It turns out that as the universe expands, the volume of Tardis regions grows more quickly and this makes it look as if the expansion of the entire universe is accelerating.

...Tardis regions would look like parts of the universe that are particularly low density. If that sounds familiar, it’s because astronomers can actually see that our universe is filled with regions called voids that look just like this. These are parts of the universe that have far fewer galaxies than other parts of the cosmos.

How can we measure the size of the universe?

How can we measure the size of the universe?: "By now you should be getting a pretty good idea how the most distant galaxies can be further away than 13.8 billion light years. For the first part of the trip, the light that is just now reaching us was traveling through a much more compact universe than we have now. As time went on and space expanded, the distance between the photon and where it started increased at 'faster than light.' Again, this doesn't mean that light was traveling faster than light. Anyone watching the beam go by would measure it at 3x108 m/s, the ordinary cosmic speed limit.

Even so, there's a maximum distance that light could have traveled since time began. This is known as the horizon, and based on our best cosmological measurements, it's about 48 billion light years. The light that we see from the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is reaching us from a point very near to the horizon."

A Scientist Takes On Gravity - NYTimes.com

A Scientist Takes On Gravity - NYTimes.com: Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Why Einstein was wrong about relativity

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html

Is there a language problem with quantum physics? - physics-math - 05 January 2008 - New Scientist

Is there a language problem with quantum physics? - physics-math - 05 January 2008 - New Scientist: "Bohm pointed out that quantum effects are much more process-based, so to describe them accurately requires a process-based language rich in verbs, and in which nouns play only a secondary role. In the last year of his life, Bohm and some like-minded physicists, including myself, met a number of native American elders of the Blackfoot, Micmac and Ojibwa tribes - all speakers of the Algonquian family of languages. These languages have a wide variety of verb forms, while they lack the notion of dividing the world into categories of objects, such as "fish", "trees" or "birds".

Take, for example, the phrase in the Montagnais language, Hipiskapigoka iagusit. In a 1729 dictionary, this was translated as "the magician/sorceror sings a sick man". According to Alan Ford, an expert in the Algonquian languages at the University of Montreal, Canada, this deeply distorts the nature of the thinking processes of the Montagnais people, for the translator had tried to transform a verb-based concept into a European language dominated by nouns and object categories. Rather than there being a medicine person who is doing something to a sick patient, there is an activity of singing, a process. In this world view, songs are alive, singing is going on, and within the process is a medicine person and a sick man.

The world view of Algonquian speakers is of flux and change, of objects emerging and folding back into the flux of the world. There is not the same sense of fixed identity - even a person's name will change during their life. They believe that objects will vanish into this flux unless renewed by periodic rituals or the pipe smoked at sunrise in the sun dance ceremony of the Lakota and Blackfoot."

Shadow world

How many dimensions space has could all be a matter of perspective

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/9115/title/Shadow_World

The Illusion of Gravity

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-illusion-of-gravity