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“Black hole” is probably the wrong metaphor here, supernova might be more appropriate - repulsing investors/data, not attracting them.


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That's fine, but it's still not going to pacify anyone with more than a marginal understanding of how black holes work.

It's not obvious what you mean by "black hole".

The phrase "black hole" has no place in that article, that's marketing hype.

Black hole works by gravity. Their device works by reducing reflectivity.


It's like the laboratory black hole that was created ~1 year ago - it's not the real thing, merely an analog of it.

I think we are in a black hole already. We just don't know it yet. :D

The stuff he's talking about getting black-holed is conclusively spam; it's not stuff they're guessing about.

Infuriatingly misleading title. They simulated a black hole on a computer.

The black hole would be trying to elaborate a whole lot on top of a completely broken foundation, or trying to fix the analogy in intense detail when you should start from scratch, etc.

I just said one line about how that analogy didn't fit.


That's because the black hole sucked all the information out of it. Haha.

Maybe a Black Hole destroys information, or perhaps it changes information to a form that we can't (yet) recognize. Presently, both of those states would look the same to us.

What a letdown. Hype us all up for ET and then spit out that it's probably a black hole.

The universe is a cruel mistress, astronomy reporting, worse.


It doesn't, really, I guess they were trying to say that Hawking's predictions don't give us a clue what's going on with the information – if the black hole radiates like a black body it can't really push the information out through it.

> Because we found no better analogy, we named them "holes" despite the fact that they are basically the opposite: an object with enormous mass.

Strictly speaking, the defining character is enormous density, not mass. And the black hole is arguably a name for an effect of the object, not the object itself; the object itself is (or is in the process of becoming; verb tenses get weird when time gets weird) infinitesimally small, but the “black hole” generally refers to the space bounded by the event horizon.


black holes are capturing imagination because of scale and many other reasons, but their danger just not worth to even discuss. Space is empty and time is slow.

Eh, that's taking it too far as the parent does.

"Hole" and "in" are pretty good metaphors for what a black hole is. It's hard to have any particularly accurate metaphors for what a black hole is because time dilation, the speed of light, curved space, etc. just aren't a part of life for any humans.


It's not quite Maxwell's demon because the event horizon is a one-way causal ticket. The information might not be destroyed but it is totally inaccessible on this side of the horizon.

Imagine using the word "supersonic" while talking about black holes.

Sad.

The new terms do not sound as cool as "event horizon", "black hole" and "singularity".


Either the title is incorrect or they're making the much greater claim that they've retrieved information that escaped a black hole.
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