marbles, physics

[Dave Aitel <dave () immunitysec com>]

A few weeks ago a story about some researchers creating a black hole 
inside a fireball of some kind hit slashdot 
(http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/17/1541230&from=rss). 
I asked the physics researcher, who specializes in tiny physics (even by 
their standards) who's taking Spanish class with me about it. Today he 
handed me a paper entitled "The RHIC fireball as a dual black hole", by 
one Horatiu Nastase of Brown University. He then explained to me that 
they were not really talking about a black hole, but something that had 
the properties of a black hole, but which is not a black hole.

He actually agrees with the math behind the paper, but does not agree 
with the conclusion. The basic theory is that they took two large gold 
atoms and threw them together and then expected jets, but instead got a 
thermal distribution, indicative of a black hole's quantum effects.

But, as he points out, this is like throwing two bags of a thousand 
marbles at each other (where marbles are quarks) and expecting a lot of 
direct hits. His intuition is that you only reach the conclusion that 
what you're seeing is a soliton (black hole-ish thing) if  you think you 
can't get a thermal like distribution from a simpler explaination. (I.e. 
bags of marbles thrown at each other probably are very thermal-like 
without black holes). Basically, he didn't think much of the experiment 
itself ("There are easier ways to test string theory") but he thought 
the ideas were cool.

My point is this: Don't be the guy without experimental experience. 
Immunity is teaching our Win32 Overflows and MSRPC analysis classes on 
April 4th here in NYC. We still have some room for people who want to 
know the buffer overflows experimentally. At the end of the first two 
days, you WILL be able to write buffer overflows. At the end of the 
fourth day, you'll be able to find overflows in MSRPC applications. It's 
that simple.

Thanks,
Dave Aitel
Immunity, Inc.




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