Uncertainty Principle for Black Holes

The above video discusses black-hole mathematical singularity problems. The current laws of physics seem to break down once a particle crosses a black hole's event horizon. One mathematical singularity occurs at the Schwarzschild radius; another occurs at the black hole's center. That being said, we will show if Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is employed, the singularity problems vanish and the laws of physics are restored. First, we define the variables we will use:

Before we examine a black hole, let's look at an electron orbiting a hydrogen nucleus. If we know the electron's mass and its approximate velocity (close to light speed c),i.e., its momentum, then we don't know its exact position. Its position could be anywhere within the Bohr radius. The product of its uncertain position and momentum gives us a number close to Planck's reduced constant:

We can imagine the electron being anywhere within a spherical cloud extending as far as the Bohr radius:

Now, let's take the mass of a black hole. Let's assume it is greater than the Planck mass. At the black hole's Schwarzschild radius, equation 3 is true:

Next, we add a pinch of algebra to get equation/inequality 5--an uncertainty principle for the black hole.

So far, so good, but we run into a problem when we reduce radius r to, say, the Planck length:

The inequality at 6 clearly violates the uncertainty principle. The left side is required to be greater or equal to the right side--not less! The problem is caused by the momentum term containing nothing but constants (the Planck mass, c, and m).

If we are more certain about the position or size of the black hole's physical singularity, we need to be more uncertain about its momentum, so we need a momentum uncertainty factor represented by the Greek letter eta:

At 8 we see the uncertainty principle is restored. When radius r shrinks to a Planck or even a zero limit, eta blows up as it should.

Below we do some more algebra and derive 14:

At 14 we see the total energy on the right side never exceeds the total finite energy on the left side. A large momentum uncertainty (eta) cancels position certainty due to a small or zero radius. The inequality/equation at 14 also implies the black hole's singularity position is uncertain if the momentum is known. It could be located anywhere within a sphere bounded by the Schwarzschild radius. The most probable location being the center.

We can take what we have developed so far and apply it to an energy conservation technique used within a previous post titled "High Energy Quantum Gravity." At 15 below we take the total energy between two orbiting bodies and subtract the strong, weak and electromagnetic energies.

The gravitational energy that remains will have a radius (ro) independent of radius r. The total gravitational energy remains constant no matter the distance r. However, we've factored in eta to conserve the Heisenberg uncertainty principle if r shrinks below the Scharzschild limit. Equation 15 reveals that a small force over a large area is equal to a large force over a small area.

Now, let's take what we now know and apply it to the singularity problems that crop up in the Schwarzshild metric below:

At 16, the right side's first term is infinity if r = rs. This implies the spacetime interval (ds) is infinite at the Schwarzschild radius--which is ridiculous. If r = 0, the last term, proper time, is infinite--also ridiculous. But of course, we have the tools to vanquish these mathematical singularities. We know the following Lorenz equations are true:

From 19 to 23 we make some substitutions and simplify the metric at 24:

At 25 we factor in eta:

Now, the only time we get infinity is when r is infinity and kappa is greater than zero. This makes sense if you stop and think about it (see results below).

When the radius is equal to the Schwarzschild radius, the spacetime interval is finite and the proper time is zero. When the radius is zero, the spacetime interval is only the outside observer's time, which makes sense, since nothing can move through zero space (a single point). The proper time is also zero, which makes sense, since it implies that time began after the universe expanded beyond a single point. Thus the current laws of physics that previously broke down are now at least partially fixed.

Special thanks to Cosmological {Prime} Causality for linking this post. Click here to read their blog.

High Energy Quantum Gravity

In the above video, Sabine Hossenfelder discusses one of the shortcomings of quantizing gravity. At high energies or short distances things go haywire and you get crazy big numbers or infinities. In this post I present one possible solution to this problem. It is not the only solution, and, only experiments will reveal which solution is correct, or, reveal that none are correct. Here is a list of variables we will be working with:

Let's start things off by taking two arbitrary masses (m',m) and creating a reduced-mass Schwarzschild radius:

At equation 2 below, we express the maximum energy of the gravitational field between the two masses. Notice at equation 3, if the radius between the two masses is taken to the zero limit, you don't end up with an infinity. Instead the maximum gravitational energy is conserved, and, said energy never exceeds the maximum energy available--which is always finite.

The equation at lines 2 and 3 can be written in a more familiar form of work (energy) equals force times distance (see 3a below):

If the distance (carrot r) is great, the gravitational force (mg) is small, but if the distance goes to zero, the force blows up to infinity, but ... the energy is conserved, since the infinite force is only along a zero distance.

The next step is to quantize what we have so far. Let's take equation 3a and use a scale factor (alpha). At equation 4, we multiply alpha by a time derivative of h-bar. That takes care of energy (E). On the right side of 4 we have alpha times the time derivative of momentum (p) times the distance. The time derivative of momentum is, of course, the force.

From 4 we derive Heisenberg's uncertainty principle for the singularity (reduced by the alpha factor):

What does equation 7 tell us? It indicates that if we know the exact position of a singularity, we are completely uncertain about its momentum, and vice versa.

Taming Infinities--Introducing n-space

Each line has an infinite number of points. We tame this infinity by creating an arbitrary finite unit. For example, take the set of real numbers. Between 0 and 1 there are an infinite number of numbers:

Normally, we count using integers: 1, 2, 3, etc. But we don't have to do it that way. We could count like this: 1-infinity, 2-infinity, 3-infinity--all the way up to infinity-infinity. If 3 is greater than 2, than 3-infinity is greater than 2-infinity. So what we have are different magnitudes of infinity that make up our finite numbers. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to assume we could add up an infinite set of numbers and get a finite number. For example, we could take the entire line of positive real numbers ...

...and shape it into a circle:

Now infinity is equal to zero and 2pi radians, i.e., finite numbers.

Let's imagine we are extremely naive, we don't know the first integer greater than zero. So we decide to add up all the real numbers from zero to the next integer point. That gives us an infinity:

The vertical lines represent the infinite quantity of real numbers between zero and the question mark. They make a nice 2D drawing of a triangle. The average real number is at the half-way point. If we take this number (.5) and multiply it by 2, we get the right answer: not infinity, but 1. This is the basic logic behind n-space. We take an infinite number of points in space of any number of dimensions and map them to a 2D space. The average value (expectation value) becomes our vertical axis. We multiply this value by the horizontal axis to get the total area which is a finite value.

The above diagram shows how each point in the original lattice space is mapped to n-space. Each point in the original space becomes a vertical line in n-space. So an infinite number of points, lines, planes or cubes (lattice cells) become an infinite number of vertical lines. The average vertical line (bar-np) is multiplied by the horizontal line (nx) to get the area--which is the correct finite answer.

Why is the n-space area the correct answer--and not infinity? Consider the following diagram:

Max Planck found that if he added up a set of finite discrete energies, he got the correct finite value. The above diagram shows we can also add up an infinite set of continuous energies and get the same finite value! Whether the energies are discrete or continuous, the area under the curve is the same. Thus, finding the area under the n-space curve is a way to find the correct answer. (Take note that, throughout this post, we take the energy term normally reserved for a single particle and use it to represent any energy. Sometimes the frequency and Planck's constant are set to one.)

The following relationships show us how to get the values in n-space we need to calculate the correct, finite answer:

Now, we want n-space to help us solve infinity problems in the quantum as well as the classical realm. This is why n-space was derived from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Here are the variables involved:

Here is the derivation:

Equation 12 shows the n-space area is always greater than or equal to 1/2--or the ground-state:

According to equation 13, the total energy in a system, like Planck's constant, has two components, dimensions, or factors (nx, np). The horizontal dimension (nx) is derived from position, and the vertical dimension is derived from momentum. The total energy is equal to or greater than the ground-state energy. Using equation 12 we can derive equation 14:

At 14, k is a constant, so if equation 14 represents the total energy in the system, that energy is conserved. It does not matter how big or small the average energy is at any given point in the original space or lattice. Nor does it matter if there are an infinite number of such points. That energy or quantum number (np) is offset by quantum number (nx), giving the conserved quantity.

Now that we've laid the groundwork for n-space, let's attempt to solve a classic problem: calculating the total energy in a sphere, where each point in that sphere has a given amount of energy, momentum, and/or mass. And, of course, there are an infinite number of points in the sphere.

Immediately we run into a problem: if we know the exact energy at each point, we know the exact momentum if we divide the energy by c (light speed), and, it is obvious we know the exact position as well--a clear violation of the uncertainty principle. If we zero in on a point in space, according to Heisenberg, we should be totally uncertain about the energy and momentum. According to the de Broglie wavelength formula, if we reduce a wavelength to zero, i.e., a single point, we should have infinite energy! And, we can only know that if we have no clue where that point is located!

Below is the relevant math:

Realistically, each point of energy is not a point at all, but a wavelength with a one-dimensional magnitude. If the average wavelength is greater than zero, then we have a finite energy at each wavelength.

We can think of each wavelength as a line. Assuming we know the energies and momentums, we don't know the positions, but we can make this fact unimportant if we calculate the average energy/momentum. Then we know that at any randomly chosen position the average energy is always the same. We can then map each energy/momentum to n-space.

Using equations 21 and 22 we find the average vertical factor (np).

We use the following equations to find the horizontal factor (nx):

At equation 23 we see a problem. To find nx we must first know nt--the total that we are trying to calculate! So we move on to equation 24. We know the total volume but we don't know this thing called the unit volume. We get a unit volume by taking the volume of another system, where we know all the variable values, and multiplying that volume by a factor of np/nt (see equation 25). Once we have our unit volume, we can plug that into equation 24 to get the nx value for the instant problem.

We do the final steps below:

The strategy we used works as long as the following is true:

Suppose we have a scenario where we have a volume of energy, say, a star. The energy is conserved as follows:

The star collapses into a black hole. All wavelengths allegedly shrink to a zero limit. That forces the average momentum factor np to blow up to infinity:

At equation 31, the star's radius also shrinks to a zero limit. We should end up with a singularity that has a position unknown to us, assuming we know the total energy, mass, and momentum. We can imagine the singularity being anywhere within the Schwarzschild radius. Nevertheless, we can crudely map the star to n-space as follows:

As explained earlier, the positions of the wavelengths and the position of the singularity become irrelevant when we determine the average np for each wavelength. Now, let's assume we don't know the star's total energy. We want to find it, so we need to find the value of nx. The star volume is its radius cubed times 4/3 pi. The Schwarzschild radius cubed times 4/3 pi shall serve as the unit volume. We divide the volume by the unit volume--the 4/3 pi's cancel:

When we do the math we see that the star's total energy is finite and is equal to the black hole's (assuming energy is constant and none was transferred).

So in the case of the black hole, np had an infinite limit, but nx had a zero limit--so the total energy ended up being finite and conserved.

Resolving the Cosmological Constant Problem

Imagine you're a quantum physicist and you just got through calculating the energy density of the vacuum. To your horror you find that your calculation is around a hundred orders of magnitude greater than vacuum energy density measurements! This, in a nutshell, is the cosmological constant problem. According to your numbers, the cosmological constant should be huge. According to WMAP measuremments, the cosmological constant is too small to tweet about. In this post we shed some light on this problem. First, here are the variables we will be using:

Below we derive the cosmological constant value based on the WMAP vacuum energy density measurement of approximately 10^-10 Joules per cubic meter (see equations 3 and 4):

The next order of business is to consider the limitations caused by the Compton wavelength formula and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle--so we derive equation 8:

There are two ways we can interpret equation 8: 1. If delta-x grows smaller, energy (delta-E) grows bigger. This makes perfect sense when you consider that smaller spaces contain shorter wavelengths, and shorter wavelengths correspond to higher energies. 2. If delta-x grows smaller, delta-E becomes more uncertain. In any case, we use equation 8 as our means to make sense of the cosmological constant problem.

Equation 9 below is equation 8 modified. On the left side we have the vacuum energy measurement (E) and one meter (x). Of course the product of these values is far greater than Planck's constant, so the right side has the scale factor n:

OK, here's what we need to do: we need to reduce the vacuum's volume while maintaining a constant energy density. This can be done, but only up to a point. The question becomes, up to what point? Or, if you prefer, down to what point? How small can we make the energy and space before things get weird? Here's the answer:

Equation 10 above is the formula for finding the cutoff, or, the Heisenberg uncertainty limit. The product of the energy and space can't go below h-bar/2 without violating the uncertainty principle.

At 11 and 12 below, we plug-n-chug:

At the cutoff, the distance is around 10^-4 meters. The volume is 10^-12 cubic meters. The energy is approximately 10^-22 Joules. If the space is reduced further, the energy value will explode! With an upper limit of infinity! Obviously, if the energy skyrockets, or becomes more uncertain, the energy density won't be the same--and any calculation done at that level will yield ridiculous results.

The diagram below shows vacuum energy density matches observations at or above the cutoff. Any meaningful measurement is taken above that point. But if you prefer infinities and uncertainties, feel free to go smaller than the Heisenberg limit.

Thus, the cosmological constant problem appears to be a natural consequence of doing calculations and measurements below the cutoff limit.