One of my favourite readers, Mr Andy B, has suggested that we might all be inside one of the Head-on Collider's black holes, and just not know it. That has made me think, so I have been doing some research.
According to the first piece of information I've gleaned from the Hubble site, you wouldn't know. They have a nice interactive graphic showing what happens to a clock when it falls into a black hole: The time slows down and it (the clock) turns red. It goes on to say that "...if we were falling with the clock, time would appear to behave perfectly normally. We would see no slowdown as we approached the event horizon. We would cross the horizon without any perceptible change, and our color would not appear to change. This is the principle of relativity: things can appear different depending on whether you are moving or standing still."
Now then. That all seems to be very satisfactory with nothing to worry about. NOT TRUE. We're being distracted by the flipping clock. In another interactive experiment, you can actually see what it's like to fall into a black hole yourself. And guess what. It goes badly for you. (There's a surprise!) To start with, as you enter, your body begins to stretch until it stretches apart. Ouch! Then "...in the last moments of your journey, your body [is] compressed into the central singularity of the black hole, a single point of infinite density".
So that's my mind made up, thank you Mr Interactive Hubble. Despite the nice sound-effects, I'll take my cue from the principle of relativity and NOT travel with the clock.
According to the first piece of information I've gleaned from the Hubble site, you wouldn't know. They have a nice interactive graphic showing what happens to a clock when it falls into a black hole: The time slows down and it (the clock) turns red. It goes on to say that "...if we were falling with the clock, time would appear to behave perfectly normally. We would see no slowdown as we approached the event horizon. We would cross the horizon without any perceptible change, and our color would not appear to change. This is the principle of relativity: things can appear different depending on whether you are moving or standing still."
Now then. That all seems to be very satisfactory with nothing to worry about. NOT TRUE. We're being distracted by the flipping clock. In another interactive experiment, you can actually see what it's like to fall into a black hole yourself. And guess what. It goes badly for you. (There's a surprise!) To start with, as you enter, your body begins to stretch until it stretches apart. Ouch! Then "...in the last moments of your journey, your body [is] compressed into the central singularity of the black hole, a single point of infinite density".
So that's my mind made up, thank you Mr Interactive Hubble. Despite the nice sound-effects, I'll take my cue from the principle of relativity and NOT travel with the clock.
2 comments:
All those Collider black holes (or is there just one?) that we might have fallen into, or they fell into us - it's enough to send you back to ALICE IN WONDERLAND where reality is mighty strange, just as it is in those black holes (hole). Any coincidence that Lewis Carroll was a mathematician who told tales where the tail wags the dog?
You're beginning to sound like me, Mr Geyser. Are you already in a black hole? Maybe Alice didn't go down a rabbit hole, but a black hole........... where tails wagged dogs and you could pick up an inexpensive Theoretical 4-pack or Higgs Boson from any passing Queen?
Post a Comment