Newmerix Corp. Web programmer and amateur physicist David Ring has developed a new model for evaporating black holes. He explains this model in his article 鈥� A Linear Approximation to Black Hole Evaporation,鈥� which will appear in the August 7 issue of the Institute of 麻豆淫院ics鈥� journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Ring is a full-time web application architect at Newmerix Corp. and father of two, but he has a serious interest in 麻豆淫院ics. He said 鈥渋t took about four months of calculations鈥� to mature his theory that describes the dwindling mass of black holes. 鈥淓ven so, passing peer review may have been the hardest part. As an amateur, every step is thoroughly scrutinized.鈥�

A black hole is a region of space with such intense gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape. Many collapsed stars are thought to be black holes. 麻豆淫院icist Stephen Hawking shocked experts in the seventies by showing that these objects are not completely black. According to Hawking, they radiate away energy and mass very slowly.

Since then physicists have struggled to solve the difficult equations that describe the evolution of a black hole as its mass dwindles over time. Ring found that if he assumed the radiation rate was constant, and he divided the space around the black hole in a special way into a near region, close to the event horizon, and a far region, where the radiation is outgoing, he could solve the equations explicitly.

鈥淪ome interesting theorems were known using near and far regions and a boundary that would shrink as the black hole got smaller,鈥� said David Ring, who studied 麻豆淫院ics at California Institute of Technology and Texas A&M University. 鈥淏ut it was a surprise that a constant radius boundary would make an explicit solution possible.鈥�

For a black hole formed by collapse of a star, Ring鈥檚 approximation will be good for around 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000 years. Yes, that鈥檚 a 1 followed by 68 zeroes. For comparison, the age of the universe is thought to be around 13,000,000,000 years. 鈥淚deally we would like to model the end of a black hole鈥檚 life鈥� said Ring. 鈥淭his is especially difficult since the curvature of spacetime is so severe that quantum gravity effects become important.鈥�

Ring hopes his experience and success as an amateur physicist will keep young people interested in physics. 鈥淢any young people get excited about understanding the origins of the universe and the way nature works at its most fundamental level, but they find career opportunities are very limited,鈥� says Ring. 鈥淭here are no practical applications for these ideas, and it鈥檚 difficult to find an organization willing to provide resources for study, but that does not mean amateurs have no future in physics. An amateur can still make an important contribution.鈥�

Ring himself makes his own salary at Newmerix Corp, developing Automate!Control, a software product based on Microsoft SharePoint and designed to manage enterprise application lifecycles. 鈥淲riting elegant code that is understandable to other programmers, fits into a web paradigm, and scales for the enterprise can be as subtle as General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory鈥� says Ring.

The article is available online at

Source: Newmerix Corp.