One of the hypotheses that I’ve seen to possibly explain dark energy is that it is created, by the e = mc2 equation, by the destruction of matter that is absorbed by black holes. From what I gather, the amount of “stuff” black holes absorb correlates with how rapidly the universe is expanding. Is there anything to that hypothesis?
If I decided I want to look into that hypothesis, and other similar questions*, to what level should I study math? Is two semesters of undergraduate level calculus and linear algebra enough, or would higher level classes be necessary?
For those of you who have taken those kinds of classes / done the relevant studying yourself, or know someone who has, do you find that this area of study “scratches the itch” for religiosity that many humans have? Do you think this kind of study does for physicists what reading the Bible, Koran, etc. does for devout followers of traditional religions?
*. Mysteries like why dark matter is needed to explain why galaxies don’t fly apart due to insufficient mass. I imagine actually digging into those numbers and running the calculations oneself is pretty complicated.
That isn’t a thing as stated. You are probably thinking of something else: an idea called “cosmologically coupled black holes”. In this, black hole singularities are averted by the formation of a dark-energy-like region (i.e., a spacetime patch with the right “pressure” properties); and those patches are coupled to – influenced by – the changing cosmological scale; and the average cosmological pressure exerted by a black hole is dominated by its novel interior properties. If you set it up just right, you will have the masses of black holes increasing as the universe expands in just the right way to provide the required constant energy density with the right pressure properties, thereby having black holes “be” the dark energy.
As with most new ideas that leave the sketch board, it has some intriguing benefits (e.g., able to explain a number of observational issues) but it has some important problems (e.g., not consistent with observations from black hole mergers).
“Look into” has many levels. I’d say you’re already looking into it by starting this thread. Moving to “reading popular science blogs and watching YouTube summaries” doesn’t take much math background. Physics background is going to be a limiter more than math for many of those outlets (e.g., knowing something about the main cosmic “characters” in the story, the main problems being tackled, the principle observational approaches.)
A next step would be popular science books that give more rounded yet accessible insight into GR and/or cosmology. Those won’t cross you over into the technical side, but they would provide a broad view of the physics. For your footnoted example of dark matter and galaxies, the core ideas are certainly accessible without crazy math. At this level, it does require the right frame of mind, that is trusting the writer to carry you on a thought-provoking journey through neat ideas that are likely to break pre-existing heuristics (because they are bad heuristics) and likely to feel incomplete.
A big leap would be reading introductory textbooks on GR and cosmology. This would point to having trained in multivariate/vector calculus, linear algebra, real analysis (lite), and differential equations on the math side; and special relativity, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics, perturbation theory, and statistical mechanics on the physics side. The usual way you get all that is as part of an undergraduate degree in physics.
Skipping further ahead still: to actually crack open the scientific papers and digest the math in them, substantial undergraduate and graduate training in physics would be needed to get started, and ideally with some specialization in graduate school.
My short answer is that this isn’t at all how I think about all this. Longer answer later.
The most relevant intrinsic human itches that, to my eye, drive this sort of study are the pleasure of building and the pleasure of discovery. Taking the resources you have (physical or mental), making something new out of them, and seeing that new thing work is a joy. And, seeing a mystery, poking and prodding at it (physically or mentally), and having it crack under those investigations is a joy. Both of these seem like deep-rooted and evolutionarily driven itches. These are the core “itches” for science. (And many human hobbies and pasttimes.)
I don’t see those as the core itches scratched by religion. First, there is a pull to authority. Having certain hierarchical social constructs in place is evolutionarily helpful for family/team/tribe/etc. functionality. Sometimes the “leader” has to say “go!”, and others need to follow or else bad things might come to pass. Also, the decisions at hand may not be well suited for distributed control anyway, and there may be a skill gap or mental load limit that “requires” some other figure to hand down guidance. All this is to say that it is natural that humans feel a pull to authority as they get through their days, starting with authority vested in their parents and mentors but potentially including some form of god.
Second, there is a pull to the avoidance of uncertainty. Our evolutionary ancestors fared better when they found uncertainty uncomfortable. “What was that noise? I had best get away from it and get myself into a more understood situation.” So, it seems very natural that people are drawn to to a source of “certainty” like religion.
So, while the intrinsic pulls of authority or avoiding uncertainty exist for me, too, (I am human), they are not in any real way the motivations for my education and career interests. And for the uncertainty part: the non-religious scientist type is generally comfortable sitting with the sorts of unknowns that religion tries to turn into knowns. I don’t mind “not knowing”, and I would much rather have gaps in my understanding than to close them erroneously.
Two Feynman quotes come to mind (italics mine)
“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery…”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”
I’m both religious, and a theoretical physicist (not currently by employment, but “physicist” is something you are, not just a job). I would say that there’s no connection whatsoever between the two.
And the mass that falls into a black hole isn’t lost. We know exactly where it is: It’s in the hole. It doesn’t go somewhere else.