The event horizon of a black hole should be impossible to study. It’s the point of no return, the boundary where gravity grows so strong that not even light can escape, so by definition nothing can… #blackhole #astronomy #sound
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The event horizon of a black hole should be impossible to study. It’s the point of no return, the boundary where gravity grows so strong that not even light can escape, so by definition nothing can carry word of it back to us. Yet a team of scientists have found a way to reach it and found a hidden signal, a faint trace, never read before, carrying information from the very edge of the horizon in the instant before it formed. From it they measured the new black hole's spin and surface gravity, and opened a fresh way to test whether Einstein's theory survives in the most extreme gravity there is.
I'm not sure if this qualifies as "news," as the event occurred about 12,000,000,000 years ago. (Astronomy journalists always use that "speed of light" excuse for being late on a story.) But here it is:
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to catch an extraordinary glimpse of a massive galaxy taking shape in the early universe. They identified a compact group of at least six galaxies that are likely to merge into a single enormous system. At the heart of this cosmic construction site…
Under these circumstances, there is a "correct" use of the hypercomputer. While a civilization could use it to compute some strategy in a war, upload themselves into it for a form of immortality, or create a new world by instructing it to run some kind of Game of Life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life) program, a more practical use would be to compute the first few thousand digits of Chaitin's constant for a programming language. This is possible because we can finitely describe "attempt to run every possible source code and record if the result halts", we just need an infinite amount of time in order to finish the task. Importantly, although we can't know the exact value of \(\Omega\), the first few thousand digits are about just as good for mortal purposes.
I always imagined that, in the story, one civilization would be unsubtle and look down on the other, which would only want to use the hypercomputer for the "academic" purpose of knowing \(\Omega\) approximately, only to realize that this knowledge is possibly the most practical use of the machine.
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#math #mathematics #ComputerScience #hypercomputer #programming #microfiction #ScienceFiction #physics #BlackHole #ClosedTimelikeCurve #relativity #probability
When I learned about this as an undergraduate I started telling people the following story: Suppose that, simultaneously, two space-faring civilizations discover a naturally-occurring closed timelike curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve) around a nearby black hole. Suppose further that these civilizations both know that this structure can be used to build a hypercomputer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation), a machine that can perform an infinite number of classical computational steps in a finite amount of time. In order to make our story more realistic, we add the following constraints:
(1) The hypercomputer can correctly perform an infinite calculation, but it must be described by a finite program.
(2) The hypercomputer can access an arbitrarily large amount of memory during calculation, but there is a fixed finite size for its output after the infinite calculation is over.
(3) A massive amount of resources are needed for each use of the hypercomputer. Perhaps it breaks after each use.
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#math #mathematics #ComputerScience #hypercomputer #programming #microfiction #ScienceFiction #physics #BlackHole #ClosedTimelikeCurve #relativity #probability
While organizing some files today I came across my copy of Charles H. Bennett's "On Random and Hard-to-Describe Numbers" from 1979 (https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789812770837_0001). It discusses Chaitin's constant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant) for a programming language, which is the probability \(\Omega\) that a randomly-chosen program will compile. This is a real number between 0 and 1 which is definable but not computable.
Bennett goes on to discuss the "Cabalistic" properties of \(\Omega\). Knowing the first few thousand digits of \(\Omega\) would allow one to decide practically all finitely refutable mathematical conjectures. Basically, \(\Omega\) is a very compact encoding of the Halting Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem), so knowing its first \(n\) bits is enough to determine whether any program up to \(n\) bits in length would eventually halt. While there are some exceptions, many open problems in mathematics can be phrased in terms of the halting of some computer program of reasonably short length.
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#math #mathematics #ComputerScience #hypercomputer #programming #microfiction #ScienceFiction #physics #BlackHole #ClosedTimelikeCurve #relativity #probability
The Dependency Black Hole
"We observed a recurring macro-structure in the dependency network that resembles a black hole: a dense core of dependency magnets, a transitional region of services increasingly entangled with the core, and an outer region of lightly connected services."
Microservice architectures promise independent evolution through loose coupling, yet large systems often exhibit strong dependency concentration around a small set of services. In an exploratory industrial case study of a product composed of 267 microservices, we triangulated multiple dependency signals -- compile-time, run-time, and task dependencies -- and iteratively validated our interpretations with practitioners. We observed a recurring macro-structure in the dependency network that resembles a black hole: a dense core of dependency magnets, a transitional region of services increasingly entangled with the core, and an outer region of lightly connected services. Based on these observations, we propose the dependency black hole theory, mapping the network to the black hole anatomy of a singularity, an event horizon, and an accretion disk, and formulating three hypotheses about how dependency concentration emerges and evolves at scale. The theory provides an explanatory lens for reasoning about dependency growth, identifying services at risk of becoming dependency magnets, and motivating governance interventions. We outline practical implications and directions for longitudinal and multi-case validation.
Here the official conference photo from the 2026 Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration meeting at Yonsei University in Seoul - spot me, I do stand out in that crowd with the most gray hair😉.
I can promise some really exciting news this year about black hole imaging. Papers are being submitted. We will also see a further growth of the network of telescopes: two more telescopes in Africa will provide a significant improvement for imaging the #blackhole in our Milky Way. #astronomy #astrodon
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