| Thoran |
10-17-2002 09:11 AM |
Quote:
Originally posted by Timber Loftis:
Continuing to read this thread jogs all the old physics memories and cleans out (a small amount of) the cobwebs. But, it makes me really more interested in the *silly string* theory than in anything else. (No, not a typo :D )
Okay you math geniuses (geniuii?), What about this:
A black hole's gravity is greater than the speed of light - no light escapes and time is warped. Okay, let's assume you are in a spaceship that can withstand the gravity, heat, etc. This gravity would mean that your acceleration rate (9.81 m/s2 here on Earth) as you fall toward the black hole would be quite high - high enough to make your velocity approach light speed as you were pulled toward the black hole. Your terminal velocity would then be infinitely close to the speed of light. Wouldn't this warp time to slow it down? I mean, it would pass normally for you, but the outside world would percieve you as unmoving and time-stopped (or infinitely close to time-stopped). What then? Does the black hole expire over time, leaving you to pop out into blank space before you crash into the center of the black hole, as you were unmoving for all intents and purposes?
Also, I understand the math behind the theory that "c" is the absolute universal posted Speed Limit. But, if the force created by a black hole keeps photons from escaping, wouldn't that cause objects falling at the black hole to move greater than the speed of light?
Okay, new HEADACHE. [img]graemlins/uhoh2.gif[/img]
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I'm making a couple assumptions her that I don't have time to verify right now, so correct me if I'm wrong... but:
Because you have mass you won't actually accelerate to C, and long before you reach relativistic speeds you'll pass through the Event Horizon of the singularity. At this point any light that illuminates you and your ship will be captured by the singularity, therefore you won't be seen in this universe again (with one possible exception I'll talk about in a minute). The theory of how you would look as you approach the event horizon however is strikingly similar to your idea. The theory is that an outside observer will see you slow as you approach the event horizon (due to the distortion of space by the black hole) and you will appear to stop, frozen just before you pass the singularity. Now at the same time less and less light is illuminating you and escaping so you'll be getting dimmer, AND what light does escape will be redshifted by the gravitational forces... so it could be that the outside observer will just see you fade away in red before you reach the horizon.
Once your at the singularity and all squished into the size of an atom nucleus, there's a theory that some of you might be able to escape the hole through the use of Quantum Physics and the wave nature of Particles. Apparently there's a probability that a particle of you will exist outside the event horizon, so they call it an Imaginary Particle (or something like that) and give it a Probability distribution of being real. So for every X of imaginary particles that COULD escape the black hole during time t, some percentage DOES. Sounds weird but there's real applications of this principal in use today. Tunneling Diodes use this basic principal to operate. What this means is that once a Black Hole sucks in all the matter it can get, it will slowly die.
This universe is stranger than we know |
