Through the black hole....

I'm just wondering what you astronony minded people think: If you could actually get close to a black hole, what do you think you would see?
Furthermore, what do you think would happen if you were sucked in (which, BTW, is completely unavoidable, not even light itself can escape)? Would you wind up in this universe in another spot, in another universe, or would you be destroyed in a millisecond?

I've been pondering this, and I thought I would ask you guys about it.

destroyed.. or at least I hope. I wouldn't want to be somewhere else in the universe with this pain.

DooMBoy said:

could actually get close to a black hole, what do you think you would see?

DooMBoy, you wouldn't see anything, that's why it's called a black hole.

If you saw a black hole, you would see everything that had been sucked into it. Light is not completely sucked in... if something is going at light speed at the event horizon, it will hover. The second it goes below light speed it will fall in. If you were to throw a ball into the hole and watched it go down, you would see the ball fall in forever. While the physical ball has long been reduced to virtually nothing, the light given off by the ball remains hovering at the event horizon. Read up on this for a better explanation.. I'm pretty sure I got it.

I think that if you were to take the trip in the black hole, you would just be reduced to an infinitely dense stream of molecules. But assuming that some how you could survive, maybe the end of a black hole is like a tiny pipe to another part of the universe and you'd be spit out there. Maybe the pipe is completely devoid of any physical laws and you would cross the distance in no time at all. I dunno... neat stuff.

If you could actually get close to a black hole, what do you think you would see?

Absence of light, i.e. nothing at all.

Furthermore, what do you think would happen if you were sucked in (which, BTW, is completely unavoidable, not even light itself can escape)? Would you wind up in this universe in another spot, in another universe, or would you be destroyed in a millisecond?

You'll have a hard time, because when you get close enough to a black hole, the difference between the gravitational force that's pulling the part of you that's closest to it and the force that's pulling the part of you that's the most far away will tear you apart. All molecular structures will break down. "You" won't be left any more, only the matter you used to consist of, in some arbitrary order.

Would you wind up in this universe in another spot? Like, transported through a wormhole? Possibly. The theory assumes that black holes appear in pairs, which are somehow gateways to each other. It's not impossible but nothing proves it.

It is actually just as possible that you'll end up at the same spot (you'll pop out of the same black hole) in another part of time, perhaps before you were sucked into the black hole, because in a black hole, there is a time singularity, which results in there being no defined past or future.

Sucked into another universe? No. There is only one universe. "Universe" is defined as being a container for absolutely everything, there can't be any other "universes".

Fredrik said:

"Universe" is defined as being a container for absolutely everything, there can't be any other "universes".

And why not?

Psyonisis said:

And why not?

I explained it right there.

Still, though, Fredrik, you could be wrong. There could thousands, millions, billions of other universes. We can never know for sure.

No. All these abstract things which you think of as "universes" would ultimately, by definition, be subsets of the one and only universe.

Fredrik said:

No. All these abstract things which you think of as "universes" would ultimately, by definition, be subsets of the one and only universe.

He's probably thinking of separate physical dimensions.

Depends on your definition of "Universe", of course.

I'm certainly not an expert but I believe there's pretty much a 0% chance of actually being able to get through a wormhole and come out on the other side without the nasty side effects Fredrik described. There are some theories about it though, something to do with rotating black holes I believe.

But then again, UAC did it so why not ?


"I should've read that book by that weelchair guy !" -- Homer Simpson

I would see everyone outside of the black hole area freeze in time. They would see me suffer from spagettification (yes, that's an actuall term for this). I would probably find a substance that disobeys the laws of even quantum physics. Then again, after the spagettification, I would have no sense of time anymore, and therefore would not even realize what I was seeing, nor would realize my ultimate destruction by gravitational forces. Destroyed and compressed into an infinitly dense piece of matter.

I've heard that if you actually got close to a black hole and for some reason weren't sucked in, and you had a watch, time would eventually slow down to the point where it would stop altogether, or something like that. My question is: how do these scientist types figure this stuff out?

They guess. Just like us. OMG WE COULD BE SCIENTISTS!!!! Somehow, I feel dumber saying that.

DooMBoy said:

I've heard that if you actually got close to a black hole and for some reason weren't sucked in, and you had a watch, time would eventually slow down to the point where it would stop altogether, or something like that. My question is: how do these scientist types figure this stuff out?

Time will, like I said, stop altogether *when you're inside the black hole*. Scientists figure such stuff out by smart-thinking.

Interesting

Fredrik said:

Time will, like I said, stop altogether *when you're inside the black hole*. Scientists figure such stuff out by smart-thinking.

Technically this is not quite right.

In your reference frame (if somehow you would actually live) time for you continues on, you will not notice any different. You would observe events away from the Black Hole at near infinite fast speeds. The problem is the absolute terms of time racing infinitely. This is paradoxical, and only a mathematical concept.

If you go infinitely fast, you are going faster than light, and you cannot stop. You would shoot out of the black hole through the singularity, and cannot be stopped by the black hole. Thus you would reach the end of the universe instantly and never stop. Pretty wierd stuff.

You CANNOT go faster than the speed of light. It's physically impossible, as the closer you approach the speed of light, the higher your mass is. Once you reach the speed of light, your mass is infinite.

About black holes, the gravity of these things is so great that to escape their gravitational pull, you must be travelling over the speed of light. Since this is impossible, everything (including light) is sucked in and squashed down to an infintesimally small size due to the enormous gravitational pull of black holes.

Psyonisis said:

If you saw a black hole, you would see everything that had been sucked into it. Light is not completely sucked in... if something is going at light speed at the event horizon, it will hover. The second it goes below light speed it will fall in. If you were to throw a ball into the hole and watched it go down, you would see the ball fall in forever. While the physical ball has long been reduced to virtually nothing, the light given off by the ball remains hovering at the event horizon. Read up on this for a better explanation.. I'm pretty sure I got it.

I think that if you were to take the trip in the black hole, you would just be reduced to an infinitely dense stream of molecules. But assuming that some how you could survive, maybe the end of a black hole is like a tiny pipe to another part of the universe and you'd be spit out there. Maybe the pipe is completely devoid of any physical laws and you would cross the distance in no time at all. I dunno... neat stuff.

Nope, because in order to see the "ball," light would have to travel out of the black hole and into your eyes so that your brain can detect it. Since light can't escape, you can't see anything.

A black hole would just be perfectly black, and would appear to be larger than it really is to the naked (hypothetical) eye, since it sucks in nearby light.

DooMBoy said:

I've heard that if you actually got close to a black hole and for some reason weren't sucked in, and you had a watch, time would eventually slow down to the point where it would stop altogether, or something like that. My question is: how do these scientist types figure this stuff out?

Toward the end of the 19th century scientists believed they were close to a complete description of the universe. They imagined that space was filled everywhere by a continuous medium called the ether. Light rays and radio signals were waves in this ether just as sound is pressure waves in air. All that was needed to complete the theory was careful measurements of the elastic properties of the ether; once they had those nailed down, everything else would fall into place.

Soon, however, discrepancies with the idea of an all-pervading ether began to appear. You would expect light to travel at a fixed speed through the ether. So if you were traveling in the same direction as the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower, and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion through the ether.

The most careful and accurate of these experiments was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887. They compared the speed of light in two beams at right angles to each other. As the earth rotates on its axis and orbits the sun, they reasoned, it will move through the ether, and the speed of light in these two beams should diverge. But Michelson and Morley found no daily or yearly differences between the two beams of light. It was as if light always traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were moving.

The Irish physicist George FitzGerald and the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz were the first to suggest that bodies moving through the ether would contract and that clocks would slow. This shrinking and slowing would be such that everyone would measure the same speed for light no matter how they were moving with respect to the ether, which FitzGerald and Lorentz regarded as a real substance.

But it was a young clerk named Albert Einstein, working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, who cut through the ether and solved the speed-of-light problem once and for all. In June 1905 he wrote one of three papers that would establish him as one of the world's leading scientists--and in the process start two conceptual revolutions that changed our understanding of time, space and reality.

In that 1905 paper, Einstein pointed out that because you could not detect whether or not you were moving through the ether, the whole notion of an ether was redundant. Instead, Einstein started from the postulate that the laws of science should appear the same to all freely moving observers. In particular, observers should all measure the same speed for light, no matter how they were moving.

This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth's rotation. However, the tiny fraction of a second you gained would be more than offset by eating airline meals.

From TIME.

What it means by time slowing is, if you were observing a spaceship flying into a black hole, time on board the spaceship relative to you would appear to be moving slower and slower the closer it got. Conversely if you were onboard the spaceship time in the rest of the Universe would appear to be moving faster (eg. 5 minutes on the ship could be a century of time on earth). This is because of the gravity of the blackhole distorting spacetime.

DooMBoy said:

My question is: how do these scientist types figure this stuff out?

Late-night brainstorm sessions over a game of scrabble, accompanied by quiet background music and excessive amounts of crack cocaine.

I have $20 (cdn) in overdue fines on a library book about the evolution of space, and how the idea of it changed.

I had to do a book report on it, which I didn't do..

Woah, fraggle replies to a physics-related thread and it isn't an MC Hawking quote? The universe is coming to its end :P

Fredrik said:

Woah, fraggle replies to a physics-related thread and it isn't an MC Hawking quote? The universe is coming to its end :P

Oh, yeah!
Damn, this is smooth.
Yo, a lot of people been askin' what the Hawkman's all about, this one's for you.

"E" stands for energy, yo that's me,
I'm a brilliant scientist and a dope MC.
Before you step to me I'd think twice G,
I'm the Lord of Chaos, King of Entropy.
You down with it? I motherfuckin' hope so,
'cause if you're not, I got a motherfuckin' rope yo!
I'll string you up, from a big-ass tree,
with a sign round your neck that says, "Wack MC".
There ain't another motherfucker hard like me,
I'm a universal constant, I'm a singularity.
Got Doomsday at my back with fat-ass tracks,
he pumps funk in the cracks and cuts wax with an axe.
So listen up bitch, 'cause there may be a test,
my style is smooth, but it's hard to digest.
My science is tight, rhymes faster than light,
like a ton of TNT I'm about to ignite.

E=mc,
E=mc Hawking!

I explode like a bomb, no one is spared,
my power is my mass times the speed of light squared.
Hoes on my tip, 15 bullets in my clip,
my hand rests heavy on my pistol grip.
Doomsday cuts it up like a Shaolin monk,
pumping the funk in your junk-trunk punk.
There's no escaping here, I'm gonna beat you out of shape,
like a fucking black hole even light can't escape.
Got the mind to bust a rhyme to make your brain bleed,
other rappers talk shit, but they gotta concede,
that I'm a 3 sandwich eatin', super-model meetin',
step to me punk and you're gonna get a beatin'.
So listen up bitch, 'cause there may be a test,
my style is smooth, but it's hard to digest.
My science is tight, rhymes faster than light,
like a ton of TNT I'm about to ignite.

E=mc,
E=mc Hawking!

Break down!
Ah yeah, that's right, E=mc Hawking motherfuckers!
God damn, that was some stanky-ass funk.
Somebody open a motherfuckin' window.
Yo Doomsday, take us out.

In order to go as fast as light, we need an infinite amount of energy, ne?

And, anyone ever hear of what would happen if all the mass inside of a penny would spontaneously turn into energy? Quite interesting.

If you get to the point where you couldn't return (event horizon, is what they call it), you'll be sucked into the black hole eventually. It'll tear your body apart. It'll hurt like hell, although it wouldn't last for that long.

Somewhere I read about it.

They said that if you visualize universe in 2d like a Paper and another universe parallel to it for instance 1 inch above it, there is no way for you in the first universe to find out about the second one, but a black hole is the contact point like if you put two nails, one above the top and one below the bottom and push them toward each other until they touch.

Sphagne said:

Somewhere I read about it.

They said that if you visualize universe in 2d like a Paper and another universe parallel to it for instance 1 inch above it, there is no way for you in the first universe to find out about the second one, but a black hole is the contact point like if you put two nails, one above the top and one below the bottom and push them toward each other until they touch.

And how the ____ would we go about doing that? Let's see, all we need is the power of the gods, some totally huge-___ nails, and a salt shaker for good luck. Like ___.

ZarcyB said:

You CANNOT go faster than the speed of light. It's physically impossible, as the closer you approach the speed of light, the higher your mass is. Once you reach the speed of light, your mass is infinite.

About black holes, the gravity of these things is so great that to escape their gravitational pull, you must be travelling over the speed of light. Since this is impossible, everything (including light) is sucked in and squashed down to an infintesimally small size due to the enormous gravitational pull of black holes.

Aah, but can you PROVE we cannot go faster than light?