I was wondering how to report this aerial photograph of two members of the bailout bestowing Presidential Task Force on Autos (PTFOA) returning one of Chevy’s plug-in electric/gas hybrid Volt mules to the paddock. I stumbled upon this description of the death of a black hole at WonderQuest.co. Seemed appropriate.
According to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, our space vacuum teems with invisible particles that flash into and out of existence like virtual fireflies.
Suppose a pair of particle-antiparticles pops into being, conveniently enough, within effective range of the black hole’s gravity.
Before the pair can annihilate each other, the black hole grabs the pair and, using the hole’s rest-mass energy, pulls it into two particles. “…one particle has negative energy and the other has positive energy,” says Andrew J.S. Hamilton, astrophysical and planetary sciences professor at the University of Colorado. “And the black hole swallows the negative energy, allowing the positive energy particle to go to infinity.”
The black hole loses the energy contained in the escaped positive-energy particle, consequently loses an equal amount of rest mass, and eventually—after enough positive-energy particles escape—loses all rest mass and dies.
Don’t hold your breath. The death of a black hole can take ten raised to the 61st power times the age of the Universe for a 30 solar-mass black hole. Mini black holes-the mass of a small mountain-can evaporate in less than the age of the Universe.
Was this all just a long joke about how much GM sucks?
In other words: GM will last forever, consuming endless amounts of taxpayer money along the way? Great.
AWD-03:
You could say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
dwford:
Depends on how you measure the size of the company.
RF,
If Bawney Fwank or Nancy Pewosi read:
“The death of a black hole can take ten raised to the 61st power times the age of the Universe for a 30 solar-mass black hole. They’ll create a “time-limited” bail-out bill for GM and ChryCo. It will be time-limited to 10 to the 61st power times the age of Arlen Spector. The dems will sell it to the Republicans as a time-limited deal. The GOP will buy that drivel and we’ll have to deal with Rabid Rick into infinity.
They really don’t need these kinds of ideas!
Poor Heisenberg. He may have said the above, but it has nothing to do with the uncertainty principle. It could be that the WonderQuest scribe is aiming for the Schrödinger Cat paradox, and just got bad analogies mixed up.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle reveals that the precision with which one measures a particle’s position will adversely affect an attempt to calculate its momentum, and vice versa.
Combined with the Observer Effect, we then get the notion of “the act of observation” affecting the experiment, introducing imprecision. Much loved by critics of science, as a loophole for speculation.
Translated to TTAC-World, any attempt to measure Mr. Baruth’s position on any highway in Florida, will fail, as Mr. Baruth’s vehicle will be elsewhere by the time the astonished cops’ consciousness register what transpired.
GM? Are they still around?
Why such a boring analogy when you could just say that GM is wasting our time, our money, and our patience?
Superbadd: I think RF was making your point in a Zen-like way, by doing just that!
It means this to me:
The Volt will [foolishly] be the last vehicle that GM cancels – like Obi Wan Kenobi, it is their last hope (at least, in their own minds).
The Truth about Astrophysics.