What Happens If You Fall into a Black Hole? [video]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150508-what-happens-when-you-fall-into-a-black-hole/

by micaeloliveira • 11 years ago

28 6 11 years ago

phyalow• 11 years ago

Simons foundation - yes thats Jim Simons of Ren Tech. Great video.

So, you fall inside something and your body will be stretched and destroyed because of the gravity of the... something, something black hole, OR, you fall in and.. well, no one has a clue what we're talking about really :)

Quiark• 11 years ago

For more of latest info, you may want to check out The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne. Disclaimer: humanity still has no clue.

michaelcampbell• 11 years ago

I can't say I understand much of this, but I find David Kaplan instantly likable.

For the real physicists among you... Is this question actually "What happens if you cross the event horizon of a black hole?" BH's aren't discrete things, right, the gravity of them (at least outside the EH?) is a continuum, no? Which would mean, pedantically, that we are already "IN" all the BH's now, just too far away to care.

Also, I find this 'stretching' argument a bit mind bending. Do we think this REALLY happens? If the gravity delta between my feet and head (assuming I'm heading in feet first, and if Ender's Game has taught us anything, why wouldn't you?) is so great, wouldn't I just get literally ripped apart? I'm not actually made of a stretchable material. Or is the gravity stretching the SPACE I'm in and I'm going with it and wouldn't notice?

Lastly - Hawking Radiation. I understand, probably incorrectly, that this is a manifestation of quantum fluctuations happening RIGHT AT the EH, and one particle flies inside the EH goes in, and the anti-particle outside the EH doesn't then get annihilated by it, and escapes, leading to an apparent radiative effect. If this is the case, why does the ANTI-particle always have to be the one that escapes? Why not the opposite? My question here is, wouldn't the particle/antiparticles that get split happen in equal amounts for a net zero radiative effect?

terminado• 11 years ago

Well, he doesn't really say what happens. In two minutes, says several times that no one knows what happens. He also says this is because the two main scientific theories directly contradict one another, leading to further confusion.

The main thing to keep in mind is that all of the "quantum" style math is an implicit abstraction of reality, attempting to approximate real things that we need to assume maybe, possibly, could potentially happen, under some conditions.

Furthermore, Einstein's brand of relativity speculates what the human mind's perception of events might be like, for specific vantage points, so this too, is also an abstraction.

There's two theoretical parts about black holes that bear consideration:

  1. The "sigularity. The core. The actual matter of the object. The 
     real surface and material substance of the thing.

  2. The "event horizon." The distance from the surface of the 
     object, at which interactions become permanent and destructive.

There are a few really obvious realities that we can assume about black holes:

  a. As a living organism, you will burst into flames and 
     disintegrate, assuredly losing consciousness long before 
     ever reaching the outer limit of the event horizon.

     This means that your relative perception, according 
     to Einstein's version of events that happen between the 
     horizon and the black hole's core are irrelevant, because
     you'll be dead.

     The stretching that occurs BETWEEN the horizon and the
     core only happens in that layer of space, and anything 
     that does get stretched like that won't get back out, 
     and has already been disintegrated, so it really doesn't 
     matter whether spaghettification is an ACTUAL phenomenon
     anyway, because we're only talking about an unrecognizable 
     soup of hot matter and radiation.

  b. Through telescopes, we know that black holes caught 
     interacting with ordinary matter do more that just 
     radiate Hawking radiation.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87

     Based on this evidence, it's silly to say that matter
     falls "into" a black hole, and gets "completely destroyed
     and disappears forever from this plain of existence"

     The truth is that matter falls past the event horizon, gets
     ripped apart, and either enters a high speed trajectory
     as an energy stream, which may impact upon the surface of 
     the black hole's core, or enter an infinite orbit, confined 
     beneath and behind the event horizon, doing things we
     cannot observe, but can only infer (for now).

     Beyond the event horizon other stuff happens, and black holes
     do shoot out electrons and other energy, but we have no proof
     that matter or energy simply "disappears."

So, personally, I don't think black holes make stuff "go away" and teleport stuff to another dimension through a mystical portal of nothingness.

The premise of the "singularity" at the center, in my opinion, needs not be infinitesimal, or microscopic. I suspect that observable black holes in space retain material/energetic plasma cores similar in size to neutron stars, while "supermassive" bodies might retain cores as large as ordinary stars, but packed with the matter and energy of many ordinary stars.

So, very obviously, from this, you can conclude that black holes, if they can vary in "size" must retain matter, and not make it disappear.

Furthermore, as for black holes that "disappear," I think it's pretty plain that their contents are being redistributed into space somehow, as they evaporate the contents of their core. Perhaps due to instabilities introduced by powerful collisions with other objects, which cause gamma ray bursts, and streams of high-energy electrons as noted with Messier 87.

Suffice to say, if microscopic black holes can evaporate, then so too can super massive black holes, which, by corollary, implies that substances trapped behind the event horizon can come back out, albeit rendered unrecognizable, compared to what went in.

The "spaghettification" concept is simply ordinary Newtonian physics taken to logical extremes. If you can weigh a different amount at the equator, as opposed to the North Pole, (about half a pound, or quarter kilogram), and that difference is induced by a mere 20 or so kilometer's distance from the gravitational center of the earth, then imagine (key word: IMAGINE) the difference in force induced by the 5 or 6 feet of distance between your toes and your head, at scales of black hole gravitation.

Anti-particles, meanwhile, are yet another abstraction of real world observations. We know that watching a positron and an electron collide they produce gamma photons. We say the two particles are annihilated, but really it's some quirk of destructive interference that converts both particles into something else. They are equivalent amounts of matter, but oppositely charged, and thus attract and destroy each other energetically.

Based on this, think about the reverse, a process that creates the opposing particles. If they are sent in opposite directions, and the truth of anti-particles, is that they destroy by destructive interference, then the essential properties are merely the manner in which they travel or propagate their waves through space. When it comes to photons, photons are not charged, so the destructive interference occurs purely in terms of waveform.

We know that Black holes can "gain" mass, and become "supermassive" so, given that, doesn't it make sense that black holes persist objects that fall into (and upon) them don't necessarily "destroy" (in the thermodynamic sense) anything?

wfn• 11 years ago

Check out this answer by RobotRollCall - a very nice fabula of a kind written by a physicist:

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/f1lgu/what_would...

What Happens If You Fall into a Black Hole? [video]

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