Germain Rousseau owns what appears to be a very elongated aquarium, minus the fish. At the bottom of the center there is a plastic ramp. When he turns on the device, a wave rushes along the tank and speeds it over the ramp. This is a black hole, he says.
Well, not a black hole in the common sense. It’s not a hole in the fabric of space-time that swallows stars. Rousseau’s experiments at the Poitiers Institute in Poitiers, France, show how the enormous gravitational pull of a black hole sucks in waves (usually light waves, but in this case water waves) and prevents them from escaping. It is a physical model that shows
This is what is known in the industry as the “gravitational analogue” and is not the only one. Despite the murmurs of many theorists skeptical that such a simple experiment could tell us anything about the universe’s darkest and most mysterious objects, researchers have been working on these over the past 15 years. I have created dozens of tabletop models.
But some researchers are beginning to simulate more aspects of the universe, including the entire infant universe. Some of them now believe that this model offers insight into the deepest nature of reality. There are even suggestions that the sacred constant of physics, the speed of light, may never be fixed. “Applying insights from these models would represent a fundamental shift in thinking,” says Rousseau. But can we really rely on liquid tanks to solve the mysteries of how the universe works?
One thing is for sure, there are many such mysteries…
