Black holes & quantum physics.


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I've been thinking: Black holes have lots of gravity & because of the high gravitational field should follow the laws of general relativity. However if you have a micro black hole the size of a neutron or proton it should follow the laws of quantum physics. My brain nearly blows a fuse trying to work out what would actually happen. Think I need Stephen Hawking's help..

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Been looking up micro black holes & some scientists speculate that they could be entangled & used in quantum computers; interesting stuff eh..

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Hmm, take it you're not convinced then TBI. :) I believe quantum computers will come online in the near future. It wouldn't surprise me if GCHQ & NSA are already using them, but they're not going to tell us are they?

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Steve, I do believe we are at the end of the line with semi conductor technology, back in the 90's for instance, CPU chips advanced in technology and speed twice a year, several manufacturers, AMD and the other unmentionable, were in competition to produce faster and faster chipsets.

We have been at the same speed now for a few years, other than make a breakthrough, they have gone to dual processors, tri processors and quad processors, I think they produce an 8 processor in one chipset now.

This cannot go on much longer as heat is the problem, these chipsets are lower voltage but draw more current, so have to dissipate much more heat, check the CPU cooling fans on modern computers!! Some have liquid cooling now!!

I recall an Indian chip designer a few years back saying the only way we can go forward for faster chipsets is to halve the insulation barrier in chips, they did that when they went to 2 volt chips, not more they can do now.

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True John, 'Moore's law' doesn't seen to be relevant anymore. If they reduce the insulation between the transistors on the chips to far then they'd be in danger of leakage or even a sort of low voltage flashover, I presume that that'd be the end for the chip. Read somewhere about graphene being more efficient than silicon for transistors, mind you think I read the same thing about gallium arsenide a few years ago, nothing much seemed to come of that, although I think GasFET's have there uses. I suppose they'll just increase the number of processors they parallel up on chipsets, they'll be using car type cooling systems to cool them..

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I think there is a Mac that has 12 core chips and yes, it is water cooled.

The speed issue was important in the past because certain things couldn't be done without a fair degree of processing power.

In my field (music production) you had to buy cards with extra processing power (DSP chips) to fit in the computer to get the job done.

So there was speed and also DSP. The ability to do lots of calculations as well as doing them quickly.

It's taken Microsoft this long to get to a 64 bit operating system as standard (2 to the power of 64).

Even though their OS's had the ability to work 64 bit, most of the time the computer that you bought only worked 32 bit.

(Mac's have been 64 bit for quite a while now).

So, it begs the question. What actually needs 3Ghz mult-core processors running 64 bit with high buss speed and lightning graphics?

Computer games maybe ? Video editing ?

The vast majority of computers are sold for domestic use which doesn't actually require them to be super fast.

There are other issues that are more important - like storage for instance.

We've seen things go backwards in some ways as smart-phones and tablets become more popular.

I just wonder if there's some new purpose that computers will be designed for?

At the moment there doesn't seem to be much that a new computer can do that your existing one can't already do.

That's why Windows 8 has been such a failure.

Now they are angling towards renting the software and it all being in the 'cloud'.

Personally I think it's a flawed strategy. Look at Adobe.

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GasFETs are used in SHF circuits Steve, I think development in semi conductor medium is at a standstill, would surprise me if engineers are already working on the next material for high speed switching/amplifying.

Lets be honest, semi conductor technology has been around since the birth of the vacuum tube!! (Valve) They just couldn't see a use for it until the Bell Telephone Labs started messing around in the late 40's.

As for speedy computers, I need speed and storage, I process/digitize photos and negatives, software like Photoshop takes oodles of Mbs of storgae and are RAM hungry.

Another project when I have time, is to copy all my vinyl, clean the clicks and pops and burn the music to CD's.

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Re 17.

It wouldn't surprise me in micro black holes turn out to be some of the missing dark matter that is out there somewhere, what dark energy is though I've got no idea, & no one else seems to know either. Perhaps the large hadron collider will reveal sumat..

Re 18.

They've speculated (in New Scientist I think) that they will be able to store mega vast amounts of digital information in some kind of quantum storage gubbins, if it ever happens that is, you know what they're like for getting it wrong. :)

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Must start reading the New Scientist again. When at Nottm Tech in the fifties, Sandy Fisher, a lecturer, always had a New Scientist rolled up under his arm as he entered the class room. It was his trade mark and he used to take up the first half of lesson discussing a NS article.

I subscribed for many years and liked the way that stuff like black holes could be explained to a relative thicko like me (only understand things that I can hit with a hammer)

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I read the free online version of New Scientist & borrow the odd copy from the library, first got into reading it when I was 15 & my cousin gave me a stack of them, also like Scientific American, helps a thicko like me understand things.

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If you paint a black hole with white paint is it still a black hole? And having crossed the event horizon and been reduced to a singularity, is the white paint still white?

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If the black hole is reduced to an infinite point then it would be smaller than light wave length, also the photons would be sucked in as well, plus the white paint & err, uhm.... Oh look a magpie is on the lawn..

I had a dream that the LHC made a mini black hole that then started to grow exponentially, it sank to the centre of the earth & overshot then oscillated back & forth eating up the planet as it went, I woke up sweating & shaking thinking "oh it was only a dream!"

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