Extra Dimension?

Thanks for the post. It is good to get off the "hamster wheel" of the routine of engineering life to remember that engineering is the application of science and science is the investigation of the universe around us. I hope to see other posts like this one. Very interesting.

Only a word: garbage.

Many of the greatest discoveries were originally labelled with such words. It's better to wait for experiment to decide.

This is a FACT: - more or less, 80 years of discussions about black-holes - up to now, no ONE experimental demonstration of existence. Who created Gen.Relativity (Einstein,Weyl, Levi-Civita, Pauli, Eddington, ...) were rather skeptical (on gravitational waves, too). In any case, I (better: my posterity) can wait for other 80 years.

There are hundreds of astronomical observations that demonstrate the existence of black holes beyond reasonable doubt. Read, e.g., crystalinks.com

Maybe I'm missing something but: *'Lensing` has already been observed several times and always the lensing object has been identified as a distant massive object of galactic proportion. This militates against a dense population of such objects as proposed. *Unless the proposed smaller 'Brane Black Holes` have truly remarkable properties, they must still 'eat` matter and thereby produce radiation. Intra solar system space is hardly empty enough that one would expect them to have gone unnoticed before now simply by radiating as they absoarb the solar wind, let alone the high probability of spectacular events as they suck up the odd comet or skewed orbit asteroid. *The amount of mass proposed, even if evenly distributed, would show up in orbital calculations for the planets, which AFAIK agree with Einstinian theory quite well, and would likely have deflected more than one of the many probes now roaming the system. (I believe that an anomilous acelleration has been detected in one of the voyagers, but it is relativiely constant and therefore not consistant with a small dense body) This appears, to my admittedly amateureye, to be a case of lack of peer review. Pragmatist BTW- HOW THE 'H` DO YOU INSERT PARAGRAPHS IN THIS FORMAT????

I do not see the statement "'Lensing' has already been observed several times and always the lensing object has been identified as a distant massive object of galactic proportion" in the orginal news release from DUKE AND RUTGERS UNIVERSITIES that I referred to above. I don't think this applies to the 'braneworld' black holes, but rather to quasars.

The postulated 'braneworld black holes' are small (mini-asteroid-size) and one inside the solar system may not be noticed! If the total number in the universe is large, they might contribute to the dark matter. Gamma ray bursts come from afar and the possibility that the rays may encounter a brain-world black hole is larger.

PS. For a line break, insert the letters BR inside angle brackets (can't show them, they are only for commands). To skip a line, insert it twice. Check below the "Preview/Submit" buttons when you reply.

Jorrie,
Thanks for the tip on format. - Right under my nose and I missed it.
The statement about lensing was my own, arising from an amateur interest in astronomy.
The article was unclear as to the meaning of 'size`.
If it refers to Dia. of event horizon you are talking of planetary or stellar masses,
which on reflection was probably not their intent.
But even if you are talking about mass, the neccessary interaction with the solar wind must produce radiation,
and lensing which especially lying, as they must, near the plane of the eclipic, would surely have been observed by now.
Even discounting the above, all observations to date seem to support the premis that
'in system` asteroids are subject to frequent collisions, and the energetic events that would
occur would not be likely to be missed over the time we have been looking at the planets.
I'm afraid this one has to be taken with a rather large grain of salt.

The 'asteroid size' definitely refers to mass - these things are extremely tiny in event horizon size. If only one of them (as calculated by the braneworld protagonists) has a fair probability of sitting inside the solar system, we have virtually no chance of observing any interaction. So-called 'micro-lensing' of GRBs at cosmological distances is what they are looking for.

The article said "several thousand" M.B.H.s within the solar system which argues for a high
probability of a collision every few hundred years.
Even given that the small size might make lensing observation improbable,
unless their properties are very remarkable, any collision with an object of similar mass must
lead to an event so energetic it would not be missed, and even very small intense gamma/U.V.
sources which these objects must be as they interact with dust and the solar wind, would probably
attract notice.
That these objects may have been created, I would not dispute, but I see in the article, no refutation
of the work of Hawking that agrees very well with observation, and requires them to have
"evaporated" long before now.

Oops, yea, I've read the 'several thousand' as inside our galaxy - my mistake. In such a case, I would also question their non-interaction. I interpret 'B.B.H.s' as different things from Hawking's evaporating mini- black holes, but I maybe wrong.

Well, the jury is still out on the structure of the universe. Granted there is enough evidence gathered both by observations and by mathematical theories to demonstrate that black holes can and do exist, it would be foolish to assume that they do not exist in any form or size or within any suitable and sizable structure in our visible and non-visible universe. To say they do not exist is like saying the earth is flat. In 50 to 100 years many other new theories will be formed and tested as we gain even more of an understanding of the universe and its vast and wonderful nature. So far to date we have been able to prove or validate many of the theories put forth by great minds such as Einstein and Planck. I for one look forward to seeing what new discoveries will be made as we expand our knowledge of the universe. It should be noted that computers have simulated some of the earliest proto galactic and stellar structures that may have made up the early universe and we have observed some of the earliest galaxies (10 to 15 billions years old) in the last couple of years or so. Brane black holes, dark matter, string theory - these all may have started as wild ideas, but all are based on solid science and physics.