Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The crew of a 99.9% lightspeed ship doesn’t experience time dilation until they return home. That's not true. They see the universe around them moving much faster. Time dilation has nothing to do with "returning home".
I've never been able to feel comfortable understanding reference frames. Even considering simpler examples: So what if a probe is launched to catch our solar system's recent cigar-shaped visitor. Assume we catch it and want to bring back a sample of equal mass to the probe. So what determines the kinetic energy required to return this sample to earth? Is the delta relative to that of the probe, to the solar system, o…
Eldar Black Holes
131–140 of 166 posts
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
[Deleted]
so, because black hole rotates, at some point in far future, speed of the shell will cross speed of light just because of geometry.
My immediate, naive instinct is that by crossing this limit, the frame dragging effect, would be extremely powerful, to the point where it might increase the radius where Hawking radiation is formed/emitted and increase the rate of Hawking radiation to avoid passing the limit. A sort of self limiting process to prevent breaking the speed limit of c.
But in the time it took to write this out, I remembered angular momentum and realised that notwithstanding the additional angular momentum of the infalling mass, the conservation of angular momentum would just make the event horizon slower as it expands. Which makes the superluminal event horizon unlikely in my mind.
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I actually got started in Meisner, Thorne, and Wheeler, and it's a slog. I've asked some physicists if they know of an easier textbook, but there doesn't seem to be one. I'm a physicist too, but my willingness to build outrageous experiments made up for my lack of theoretical agility. Still, I'd love to understand gravitation. I've still got my copy of Jackson from grad school. ;-)
There are lots of easier textbooks, all of them less...wordy. Wald's is the industry standard these days. Schutz, Carroll, and D'Inverno are all good introductions. If you're really pressed for time, Dirac wrote an intro to GR which is about as short as humanly possible. It omits most of the geometry though.
You'll probably find MTW a lot more approachable after working through a few less beastly texts.
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
There a germ of the right idea here, but our universe is really more of a black hole backwards. Within the event horizon of a black hole, the singularity is always in the future. Within our universe, we see a singularity in our past. In short, our universe looks more like a white hole than a black hole.
Black hole does not imply singularity.
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#135Wouldn't the aliens just need to wait for the black hole to evaporate in order to escape? We're talking a long time, but still possible? If it was planned just right, perhaps they could make it so they emerge in the new Universe. Also, isn't the assumption that there is a "big crunch" (also a good name for a cereal if it doesn't exist)? We're not sure whether there is a big crunch or heat death? This still seems plau…
Being emitted as undifferentiated Hawking radiation, after the black hole has shrunk to microscopic size, and when it finaly ceases to exist doesn't sound like much of a happy ending.
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#136There is a fascinating PBS Space Time video[1] about black holes that questions the very existence of whatever is "inside" a black hole. They point out that as you approach a black hole, your proper time is advancing slower and slower when compared to an observer located far away from the black hole (like us, on Earth). That means that from the point of view of this far observer, nothing happens inside a black hole u…
Here's something I've wondered about black holes, related to what's inside. Simplistically, there must be mass inside, i.e., every black hole has a mass that can somehow be measured, e.g., by orbital velocities of satellites. And the mass-energy has to equal the mass-energy that has fallen in. So far so good. But the stuff that falls in is not purely described by its mass. It also has angular momentum, electrical cha…
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feynman's lectures of physics are good for layman explanations, however they quickly feel lacking without the maths background, which you can fill in with The Theoretical Minimum. There's actually a video lecture series of the Theoretical Minimum series that you might find more approachable, that is if you haven't heard of it: https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=189C0DCE90CB6D81 (Here for the general relativity…
A small note. The "Theoretical Minimum" is not just a book, it's also a website with video lectures for the complete material. See: http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#138There is a fascinating PBS Space Time video[1] about black holes that questions the very existence of whatever is "inside" a black hole. They point out that as you approach a black hole, your proper time is advancing slower and slower when compared to an observer located far away from the black hole (like us, on Earth). That means that from the point of view of this far observer, nothing happens inside a black hole u…
Here's something I've wondered about black holes, related to what's inside. Simplistically, there must be mass inside, i.e., every black hole has a mass that can somehow be measured, e.g., by orbital velocities of satellites. And the mass-energy has to equal the mass-energy that has fallen in. So far so good. But the stuff that falls in is not purely described by its mass. It also has angular momentum, electrical cha…
That's exactly the right number to describe the macroscopic state of a no-hair black hole (defined as the horizon as seen from the outside) using a set of spatial coordinates: mass, charge, angular momentum for three spacelike axes, linear momentum for three spacelike axes, and centre-of-mass position for three spacelike points. Here I have already done a foliation of spacetime into a spatial slice with a constant timelike coordinate; it'd be normal to use coordinates in which the centre of mass is always at the origin, which fixes the last six components at zero.
On the other hand, if we omit the spacetime foliation, we are obliged to use tensor quantities for these variables; moreover, if the spacetime region we consider is not "sufficiently small", then no-hair looks much more conjectural. Foliating this region, we would expect at least the charge no-hair number not to change from one slice to another. For a black hole with a highly ionized accretion disk with nuclei or electrons liable to cross the event horizon at any time, this is a tough ask (and the subject of research in numerical relativity).
> charm and strangeness
The larger the black hole, the flatter the spacetime just outside the event horizon; astrophysical black holes' immediate neighbourhood is too flat to break quark confinement, so a surplus of colour charge seems unlikely. Conversely, a black hole small enough that tidal effects are very strong just outside the horizon is likely to be evaporating so violently that gravitational effects on hadrons just outside the horizon seems (to me, anyway) less interesting than scattering interactions.
> What's the total number of numbers that accompany a particle as it gets sucked in?
Good question. This is an area of research.
Any answer raises a second question: how does "balding" work?
Even fully classically we have this problem: if we drop a thin uniform spherical shell of neutral matter of mass M into a Schwarzschild black hole (so there's no rotation or charge or quantum-anything to consider) how do we distinguish that black hole from an identical setup except we drop in two concentric shells of 1/2 M each?
If in some future region of spacetime when the shells are inside the BH (black hole) we can distinguish between BH with one shell vs BH with two shells, then no-hair is wrong. If we cannot distinguish, then classical information is lost.
This is black hole thermodynamics because we have a relationship between macrostates (the no-hair values) and microstates (the set of values that migrated from outside the BH to inside the BH), and we can define entropy in a Boltzmannian way using that relationship. If no-hair is accurate such that we can throw in an huge number of shells each with a tiny fraction of the mass of our single-shell example, then that black hole's entropy is enormous.
The quantum picture is in some ways "just" a complication of this fully classical information loss problem. If we can throw in whole molecules / bits-of-dust, atoms and ions of various masses, free electrons, photons, neutrinos, and so forth and still see a "no-hair" set of macroscopic variables, then a reasonable-size BH's entropy is enormous, and it gets much more enormous if we only increase the BH mass while keeping the other no-hair values always zero (and letting the others vary does not help much).
If in our universe we find a black hole which we can comfortably describe with a tiny number of variables (e.g. a no-hair black hole), we should expect that it will have lots of hidden microstates thanks to things having infallen (and indeed, for astrophysical black holes, lots of particles from the stellar remnant). Did these bald away in the past? Or, if black holes evaporate, will these hidden microstates be revealed during that process?
> what's inside
Good question. There's a wide variety of guesses by theoreticians.
As we increase our number of observations of BH-BH, BH-NS, and NS-NS (NS for neutron star) mergers where we get decent gravitational wave signals, we can exclude many possible answers to these problems.
Finally,
> an upper limit on the information content of a black hole
No-hair black holes' event horizons are determined by the no-hair variables alone; their entropy limit is related to the surface area of the horizon.
> a "civilization" inside it
We don't know without a full answer to "what's inside". The "Eldar" idea is that for an extremely massive black hole with an improbably large charge (how does one prevent such an object from drawing in matter of the opposite charge?) there may be stable orbits in an interior region. I think even that is a really big stretch.
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#139There is a fascinating PBS Space Time video[1] about black holes that questions the very existence of whatever is "inside" a black hole. They point out that as you approach a black hole, your proper time is advancing slower and slower when compared to an observer located far away from the black hole (like us, on Earth). That means that from the point of view of this far observer, nothing happens inside a black hole u…
That's the thing that never made sense to me about the black holes. The closer you are to the event horizon, the faster the time passes for the universe around you. So reaching the event horizon should take infinite amount of the "outside time", so right before you reach the horizon, you should see the whole future of the universe, including its end, if there's any. So how do black holes gain any mass then?
This is not an analogy as much as an example of an external-vs-internal observer problem. When you close the (opaque, insulated) door of your fridge, observers inside will see the (filament of the incandescent) light significantly dim, and if the door stays closed long enough, will see the light thermalize with rest of the internal volume. Someone standing outside the fridge might not even see the initial dimming; indeed, that observer may only ever see the light as "on" (rather than "heating from cold" or "cooling from hot").
[1] We could talk about naked singularities a bit: this usually means that there is at least one outside-the-black-hole observer for which the shape of the horizon is such that the centre of mass-energy of the BH is outside the horizon, rather than an observer for which there is no horizon at all. However, even these scantily clad BHs don't arise in realistic universes described by General Relativity. Fully naked singularites (where at least one observer exists which does not see any horizon at all) require an alternative theory of gravitation, or conditions extremely unlike those anywhere in our universe.
[2] Consider the observation of a supermassive black hole at the edge of the observable universe. From our view here around Earth, we see a race between a very bright star about to cross the black hole's event horizon and the black hole about to cross our Hubble horizon. Observatory A sees the star vanishing behind the horizon just in time; Observatory B sees the BH cross out of observability before the star vanishes behind the BH horizon. A and B have (very slightly) different Hubble horizons focused on them [3], and also with a (n also slightly) different radial distance to the BH horizon. "B" can never directly see the same coincidence of events that "A" sees; should "B" deny the infalling?
[3] Maybe this is illustrative of observer-centred observables? Glories (an optical phenomenon similar to rainbows) are so observer-specific that you and your handheld camera will have different ones (and each of your eyes will have different ones). As noted in the "From the air" subsection, we can tell what seat a photographer of a glory from a plane must have been sitting in. https://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/gloim1.htm Likewise, we can determine the location in spacetime of an observer of a star-into-black-hole event from that observer's detailed description.
Re: Eldar Black Holes
#140There is a fascinating PBS Space Time video[1] about black holes that questions the very existence of whatever is "inside" a black hole. They point out that as you approach a black hole, your proper time is advancing slower and slower when compared to an observer located far away from the black hole (like us, on Earth). That means that from the point of view of this far observer, nothing happens inside a black hole u…
I also really need one of these:
https://store.dftba.com/collections/all/products/heat-death-...