CHAPTER 36. HIDDEN RADICAL THEORY # 3: SIDHARTH'S QUANTUM BLACK HOLES 

B. G. Sidharth, of the Centre for Applicable Mathematics and Computer Sciences at India’s B. M. Birla Science Centre, is a prolific author and researcher on topics of modern physics.

Sidharth has hypothesized about the fractal structure of the universe, about holistic cosmology, and about dualities and linkages between the microworld and the macro-universe.

He has studied Earth’s magnetic field—geomagnetism—and looked to temperature effects on electrons in Earth’s solid core to explain puzzling reversals in our planet’s magnetic field. He has studied the magnetic field about Jupiter and astronomical links connecting early civilizations of the Indus Valley in India with Mayan Central America and Easter Island. He has studied the origin of life on Earth, and extraterrestrial chemical sources for some of life’s ingredients.

Sidharth notes two recent important discoveries of physics—the confirmation that neutrinos have nonzero mass, and the confirmation that the universe is ever-expanding, perhaps at an accelerating pace—and he discusses how these discoveries create the need for new physics models beyong the big bang and beyond the standard model of particle physics.

Quantum black holes are a central concept of Sidharth’s analyses, leading to new frameworks for understanding particle physics and astrophysics, for unifying physics’ forces, and for reconciling quantum physics and general relativity.

Quantized Fractal Spacetime

Sidharth has explored the implications of quantized spacetime—space and time being granular, not continuous, at its smallest scales. He discusses how the quantization of time—the existence of the chronon as time’s smallest quantum—leads to an explanation of the arrow of time. And quantized spacetime leads to extended particles—elementary particle building blocks that aren’t just dimensionless points, but that have extended dimensions, as string theory postulates.

Quantized spacetime is fuzzy spacetime, exhibiting the fractional dimensionality of complexity theory’s fractal geometry. This leads to quantized fractal spacetime, a framework in which Sidharth places, and expands upon, quantum superstring theory.

Quantized fractal spacetime’s geometry is not our familiar geometry, the geometry dating back to Archimedes and other ancients. Quantized fractal spacetime is non-Archimedean, or ultrametric: lengths and distances cannot be measured as in our familiar Archimedean geometry. Quantized fractal spacetime is also noncommutative: its geometry, its spacetime, is not flat or ordered according to our usual formulas of geometry and algebra.

Sidharth uses a different form of mathematics—p-adic mathematics—to describe the physics of his quantized fractal spacetime, his fuzzy noncommutative spacetime. We’ll save the details of p-adic mathematics for Chapter 38, where we’ll be discussing Pitkänen’s extensive and central use of p-adic mathematics within topological geometrodynamics. For now, we’ll just mention that other physicists, too, have found applications of p-adic mathematics to their work, and—as we’ll be detailing further in Chapter 38—mathematicians have demonstrated that p-adic numbers have a unique place alongside real numbers as the only two complete mathematical systems.

Sidharth refers to his quantized fractal spacetime, his fuzzy noncommutative spacetime, as “a new paradigm for a new century.” It is a paradigm that explains some of physics’ longstanding mysteries, such as how the elusive magnetic monopole comes to exist and why it is so hard to detect. And much more generally, through quantized fractal spacetime Sidharth has proposed a unification of electromagnetism with gravity, and in addition brought physics’ strong force into this unification.

Quantum Black Holes

Quantum black holes are a central mechanism for Sidharth’s unification of physics’ forces, and ultimately for a unification of quantum physics and general relativity. Sidharth’s quantum black holes are based on the Kerr-Newman black hole that would result from the collapse of a spinning massive star, not the earlier-modeled Schwarzschild black hole, which derives from the collapse of a stationary star.

Sidharth identifies matter particles—fermions—with quantum black holes. This is, arguably, the key to all of Sidharth’s theories. The horizon of the black hole—the dividing surface from inside of which nothing, not even light, will ever overcome the black hole’s gravitational force—corresponds to a critical quantum wavelength, called the Compton wavelength. The Compton wavelength is based on the work for which Arthur Compton won a share of the 1927 Nobel Prize for physics, for his demonstration of X-rays’ dual wave/particle nature. In Sidharth’s fractal universe, Sidharth characterizes the Compton wavelength as comparable to the thickness of the brushstrokes with which all of Nature is painted. And quantized spacetime solves a problem that must be addressed in models that incorporate black holes, preventing the model from reducing to the naked singularity that appears deep inside a black hole.

All of Sidharth’s modeling—quantized fractal spacetime, fuzzy spacetime, ultrametric and noncommutative mathematics—is brought to bear here. As he moves away from conventional spacetime, Sidharth generalizes the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and challenges conventional notions of scale. He looks at recent experimental suggestions of variation in the fine structure constant, which determines the smallest relevant quanta of space and time, and concludes that dimensionality is not absolute, but depends critically on the scale of resolution, from the Planck scale to cosmological distances. And then the next leap: to quantum effects at multiple macro scales, universally.

Fluctuational Cosmology

The logical result of Sidharth’s thinking is a framework of fluctuational cosmology. In this framework, the universe was created as a phase transition, a fluctuation in the background zero-point field. Dark energy—the mysterious force fighting gravity, pulling the universe outward—is one consequence. And more generally, fluctuational cosmology describes the emergence—from a chaotic universe at the Planck scale—of quantized spacetime, the cosmology we inhabit, and all of the laws of physics.

Sidharth’s work, summarized only briefly here, is of great intellectual breadth and depth. His applications of p-adic mathematics will be reflected in our #1 Hidden Radical Theory of New Physics, which intertwines the real physical world and the p-adic world of the mind.

First, though, our #2 theory, a theory of thought space, the world of the mind.

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NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND, although aimed at the general reading public, is intensively researched and sourced. See NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND for the endnotes associated with this excerpt, as well as for a complete bibliography of the works referenced throughout NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND.