Contrabang! #19 The One Where Ethan Doesn't Understand Temperature

Astronomers Find A ‘Cloaked’ Black Hole 500 Million Years Before Any Other (link)

One problem for the Big Bang Theory has been the discovery of supermassive black holes far older than they ought to be.

The first stars should lead to modest black holes: hundreds or thousands of solar masses. But when we see the Universe’s first black holes, they’re already ~1 billion solar masses. The leading idea is black holes form and merge, and then rapidly accrete matter at maximal rates. But those rapidly growing black holes should be invisible, obscured by the dense gas clouds they feed upon. They were, until now. New observations have revealed the earliest “cloaked” black hole ever.

At least we can get some comic relief at the concept of a "cloaked black hole." It's black, but it's bright, but it's cloaked so it's dark.

Its light is 12.95 billion years old: the most distant gas-shrouded, growing black hole ever seen.

This resolves nothing. For one, the newly discovered black hole is younger than the unexpectedly old supermassive black holes. Nor is this an example of a "modest black hole." From the Wikipedia definition for quasar.

A quasar is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus, in which a supermassive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk.

All that has happened in they have found a slightly younger supermassive black hole that still should not exist at that age according to the Big Bang Theory. It is yet more contradictory evidence, yet Ethan proclaims, "We’re one step closer to solving the mystery." How many wrongs will it take to make a right?

Is Energy Conserved When Photons Redshift In Our Expanding Universe? (link)

The question here is about the conservation of energy. The major rebuttal to the whole expanding universe / dark energy theory is that it violates the First Law of Thermodynamics: the conservation of energy. Siegel has previously told us that the argument is invalid because it does not apply to the fabric of spacetime.

But another issue arises. When a photon is red-shifted, it has lost energy. The question, then, is where did that energy go? He asserts that the model of an expanding gas is "very, very analogous to what happens in the expanding Universe."

So yes, it’s actually true: as the Universe expands, photons lose energy. But that doesn’t mean energy isn’t conserved; it means that the energy goes into the Universe’s expansion itself, in the form of work.

Ah, but that energy could not go into expanding the universe. We are already told that the expansion of the universe is caused by dark energy, which must be a distinct bucket of energy otherwise the First Law of Thermodynamics is broken.

Fortunately for him, his own analogy is bad and thus we can't use it to disprove dark energy. Temperature and wavelength are not analogous properties. Temperature is the measure of the average thermal energy of a substance, whereas wavelength is a property of a single photon. A single particle in an expanding gas does not necessarily change velocity, but the measured temperature is lower because there are fewer particles in the same volume. The proper analogy would be to compare to the heat felt when holding your hand near a light bulb. As you pull you hand away, the temperature decreases. Not because the individual photons lost energy, but because there are few photons hitting the constant surface area of your hand. Thus, less average thermal energy.

In addition to the faulty analogy and that it would nullify his own previous argument that dark energy doesn't violate the thermodynamics, there is no mechanism for photons to transform their energy into expansion of the universe. The mechanism is just assumed to exist somehow. That is not physics. Physics requires mechanics. If a teacher asks how a car moves, it is not a satisfactory answer to state, "the laws of thermodynamics are obeyed."

In all, this is perhaps the worst argument we've seen from Siegel yet in this series. Considering that the properties of light are taught in high school physics classes, and the ideal gas law in 7th grade science classes, there is no excuse for such a logical hatchet job. It must mean he is either not that smart, or not trying that hard. I suspect it's more the latter. He is more status-seeking than truth-seeking, thus his effort is spent concocting a plausible explanation to further ingratiate himself with the science establishment. Were he truly truth-seeking, and properly skeptical the way a scientist should be, he'd have realized that the wavelength of a photon is not analogous to the temperature of a gas, and that there is not not mechanism from a photon to exchange energy for universal expansion.

Ask Ethan: Can Black Holes And Dark Matter Interact? (link)

Critiquing the major premise of this one would be a bit like providing a rebuttal to a fairy tale, but I'd like to focus on one recurring claim we've seen in Starts With A Bang!, depicted in this image. He claims that spacetime flows into the singularity of a black hole. We've seen that imaged used several times now, and indirectly critiqued it in Contrabang! #12 Two-For-One Deal because he was claiming that black holes don't suck in matter, but then allowing matter to be sucked in anyway by spacetime flow into the event horizon. In this one, he is even more explicit.

The reason is simple: the fabric of space itself falls towards the central regions faster than the speed of light. Your speed limit is less than the speed at which the space beneath your feet moves, and hence, there’s no escape.

I have not been able to find where the standard science states that spacetime flows into a black hole. I can find where it is claimed to be warped around a black hole, but not sucked into it. The implication is that any body in the universe sucks in spacetime at a rate equal to its escape velocity, which means every particle is ultimately a spacetime sink. Well, that's clearly ridiculous. So why is there an exception made for black holes? Ethan even said that black holes aren't gravitationally special, so where does all this talk of spacetime "moving like a waterfall" come from? Under general relativity, mass is said to distort spacetime, but not cause it to flow like a river.