Live data from Hacker News

Eldar Black Holes

projectrho.com

141–150 of 166 posts

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#141
post #70
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

off-topic a bit: does anyone have suggestions for paths for the layperson toward being able to reason and intuit about this stuff at one level beyond pop physics claptrap? I have heard "the theoretical minimum" suggested in the past, but I haven't heard from anyone who has actually used it to go from zero to say, general relativity, only people who think it sounds good. It also seems like a steep investment -- I just…

I've not read this yet, but have paged though it a bit at a bookstore, and it looks like it has potential: "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe" by Roger Penrose [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/...

Can anyone explain why this is getting down voted? As far as I can tell from examining it quite a bit at the bookstore, and from several reviews, it looks like it satisfied the request.

Is there something about it that I have missed?

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#142
post #93
post #8

There 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’ve wondered this too but I just had a thought. I ended up asking myself why any black hole is ever bigger than critical mass if this is true. Take a black hole that’s been slurping matter in and it’s all at the event horizon because as you say, it takes forever to cross. But as that mass builds and builds doesn’t the event horizon move? Take the scene to the limit. Say a black hole never absorbs anything. The amoun…

There is so much speculation and misinformation here. One key idea of relativity is that laws of physics remain the same for all uniformly moving reference frames. Objects approaching and entering the event horizon experience time normally. For large black holes, a probe entering past the event horizon will continue to fall towards the singularity and experience time normally for a long time before being destroyed.

To external observers, of course nothing can be observed as falling through the event horizon because not even light can escape past the event horizon. So no light from beyond the horizon of the probe can ever reach the observers. But that doesn't mean things can't go past the EH normally, or that here is some other magic happening like

> I think that what this means is that you never get to the event horizon, but the horizon comes to you.

A black hole is just another object with a very very powerful gravitational field.

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#143
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue is that you cannot just put a voltmeter or other devices/methods near a BH. Not that you can't do it in a Gedankenexperiment way, of course, but in a relativistic way. Because of General & Special Relativity, things like volts and amps, charge and mass, they get 'bent' in this weird non-intuitive way. In our own (slow) world, electro-magnetism is one of those 'weird things' that comes out of special re…

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. ;-)

I'm working through Sean Carroll's "Spacetime and Geometry". So far it's been quite accessible and is replete with exercises. Carroll's explanations do a really good job of motivating definitions while also introducing deeper, beautiful math. It's not all just tensor munging.

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#144
post #8

There 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…

> Events behind the event horizon are postponed to "the end of times".

Thank you. To me, this has been obvious since I learned about the time slowing required by GR. Since then, I was unable to understand why people are talking about things "falling into" black holes. (There's an episode of SG-1 where a team is trapped by a black hole, and times keep slowing, but they never realize that this means that team WILL NEVER DIE.)

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But from our perspective, the outside observers, why do black holes gain mass? It would take an infinite amount of time from our perspective for any mass to even touch the event horizon.

At this point a few issues arise. The first is that what you’re describing is a feature of the Schwarzschild metric, which applies to a model black hole, which is time-independent and eternal. There is no particular reason to believe that this accurately describes black holes in nature. For example this metric can not describe the merger of two black holes, but we now have observational evidence that this does indeed…

I just wanted to mention that the Schwartzchild metric doesn't only apply to black holes. It's the general metric for a spherically symmetric, static space-time, so it's good for roughly spherical bodies like stars and planets over small timescales.

Recently, I worked out the ISS orbit using the Schwartzchild metric as an approximation of Earth. It's cool to see the orbital period pop out and agree with real life! It's then just a small step to calculate the time dilation experienced by ISS astronauts.

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black hole does not imply singularity.

Why not? You can’t have a black hole without a singularity. A black hole is formed only when >3 solar masses collapse in a singularity. Maybe the opposite is theoretically possible, the so called naked singularity in which a singularity is not hidden by an event horizon.

A black hole is a region that light cannot gravitationally escape. It has nothing to do with singularities which often but not always exist inside of a black hole. Small black holes often have singularities just to have enough mass density to capture light. It is not required though — imagine a binary system of two neutron stars that are each just below the mass threshold to collapse into a singularity. It would be a black hole to external observers. Oddly larger black holes require less mass density. More oddly still as you approach the size of the observable universe, the required mass density crosses the cosmic mass density, meaning light emitted from Earth cannot gravitationally escape the universe created by the Big Bang, meaning we exist inside of a black hole as big as the observable universe.

I’m not sure why I’m being so heavily down voted for stating this fact you can find in any cosmology textbook.

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?

The grandparent may be referring to the cosmic event horizon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon#Cosmic_event_hor...

Yes-ish. There are two reasons we are living inside an event horizon. First the accelerating expansion of the universe means that light emitted from earth now will never reach most of the observable universe. We can look up and see galaxies that are already beyond our cone of influence. That is the primary effect. But a secondary effect is that the mass of the universe (Big Bang remains) is sufficient even though not dense as to bend light emitted from it back onto a closed trajectory. So if there is any void beyond the cosmos that we see , observers in that void would see us—our entire observable universe—as a black hole.

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#148
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve wondered this too but I just had a thought. I ended up asking myself why any black hole is ever bigger than critical mass if this is true. Take a black hole that’s been slurping matter in and it’s all at the event horizon because as you say, it takes forever to cross. But as that mass builds and builds doesn’t the event horizon move? Take the scene to the limit. Say a black hole never absorbs anything. The amoun…

There is so much speculation and misinformation here. One key idea of relativity is that laws of physics remain the same for all uniformly moving reference frames. Objects approaching and entering the event horizon experience time normally. For large black holes, a probe entering past the event horizon will continue to fall towards the singularity and experience time normally for a long time before being destroyed. T…

GP was talking about the passage of time from the standpoint of the external observer. About time dialation, not about the singularity.

Near the horizon a heartbeat takes eons from the perspective of someone watching you fly into the black hole. Assuming of course that you haven’t already been torn to shreds by the high energy particles and gamma rays traveling perpendicular to your path...

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grandparent may be referring to the cosmic event horizon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon#Cosmic_event_hor...

Yes-ish. There are two reasons we are living inside an event horizon. First the accelerating expansion of the universe means that light emitted from earth now will never reach most of the observable universe. We can look up and see galaxies that are already beyond our cone of influence. That is the primary effect. But a secondary effect is that the mass of the universe (Big Bang remains) is sufficient even though not…

No, respectfully, not unless you radically redefine what you mean by "black hole".

If by "black hole" you mean an object sourcing a Kerr-Newman-like metric, then you have the problem that the distribution of matter in the distribution we see is not at all like the interior region of such a metric. The metric one can infer from the bulk distribution of the visible matter is best described by a Robertson-Walker metric.

Under time-reversal, galaxies in R-W fall through each observer-centric horizon, break up into dust and gas that in turn combines into denser higher-energy and lower-entropy states.

While this might seem a little like a "white hole" (defined as a time-reversed BH), since under time-reversal a stellar BH has Hawking radiation rush into its vicinity becoming relatively dense at the time of the bust-up of the BH horizon, the difference is on the other side of that point a much lower entropy neutron star or similar body emerges from the high-entropy BH. Even stepping back a bit, macroscopically, galaxies are a lot more structured than either Hawking radiation; nor is Hawking radiation more structured than the cold relic fields crossing into optical detectability of an observer in time-reversed RW or time-reversed asymptotic de Sitter space.

This is important: the densest phase of a universe like ours is (extremely) low entropy, while the densest phase of the black hole is (extremely) high entropy, especially if we measure just at their respective horizons. Entropy here is Boltzmannian: the log relationship between the observed macrostates and microstates that can produce them. (We could even test this directly by comparing the structures in the relic fields with Hawking radiation if we were to find sufficiently low-mass astrophysical black holes; we can however get some details from the ringing modes of BH mergers).

Additionally, we can consider curvature. The extremely low bound on our universe's Weyl curvature allowed by indirect and direct gravitational wave observations (so far) completely precludes a Kerr-Newman-like solution, where Weyl curvature will be very large. Our imaging of ever older galaxies does not reveal them to be spaghettified.

Finally, it's worth noting that while Kerr-Newman and Robertson-Walker can have optical horizons so can many other solutions. For example, there are optical horizons in the Gödel solution but we obviously aren't in a Gödel universe. There are also many solutions which cannot have optical horizons; a torus or Klein bottle universe is clearly different from a Euclidean one, although all of those can be everywhere flat and horizon-free. So I don't think one should promote the presence of optical horizons into the defining characteristic of a metric.

Re: Eldar Black Holes

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, because black hole rotates, at some point in far future, speed of the shell will cross speed of light just because of geometry.

That’s a really interesting point. I wonder if there’s any proper theoretical work done on this possibility. 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 t…

It was response to deleted comment about "sticking shell" inside of a black hole, to illustrate that such shell will have superluminal speed, thus it cannot exist, because any matter will decay.
Post reply on HN