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How Would an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Die?
ananyo writes "According to the accepted account, an astronaut falling into a black hole would be ripped apart, and his remnants crushed as they plunged into the black hole's infinitely dense core. Calculations by Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, though, point to a different end: quantum effects turn the event horizon into a seething maelstrom of particles and anyone who fell in would hit a wall of fire and be burned to a crisp in an instant. There's one problem with the firewall theory. If Polchinski is right, then either general relativity or quantum mechanics is wrong and his work has triggered a mini-crisis in theoretical physics."
This looks like a job for Dr. SHELDON COOPER!
long before the astronaut gets to the event horizon. Both can be correct.
Locate a black hole and start shooting monkeys at it! "Science can not progress without heaps [of monkeys]"
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
We already know that QM and relativity can't both be true. Each theory is very good at predicting things in its realm, but they are mutually exclusive.
Bezinga!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
You would be stretched out into Spaghetti!! I saw the movie! Stephen Hawking said so himself.
The astronaut dies of old age?
Have gnu, will travel.
The smart money is no-firewall and complimentarity is bunkum.
But I'm not smart, Polchinski is.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I thought that black holes were still theoretical. Or have they been scientifically proved, and I'm just an asshat?
If they're still theoretical, why would any assumption as to their mechanism "triggered a mini-crisis in theoretical physics"?
Myself, I theorize that when approaching a black hole, one experiences "the hole" as something that may get closer and closer, but you will move in a 'new way'. This is to say that if you are between stuff and the black hole, then the stuff further than you from the hole will appear to sped up greatly, and you will not. The closer that you get to 'the hole' the faster everything outside of the hole moves, and when you touch 'the hole' everything happens at the same time.
Oh shit, did someone just blow the theoretical werld?? no.
As my advisor would say, all models, all theories are wrong... the only question is: Are they useful?
Newton is wrong, but the models he developed for large body dynamics are still the foundation of a great deal of stuff. Pick your model from any field, chemistry, biology, physics, genetics, etc... they are all "wrong" ... they are all missing something, but as long as you know the limitations of the model you can still use it to design, predict and understand small pieces of the world.
Hell is in the black hole. And pray you don't go there with a psychotic red robot.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130306084151.htm
If most of the black hole's entropy comes from entanglement across the event horizon, then (according to these researchers) the firewall never descends and the black hole can evaporate in peace.
Why can't the correct answer be both? You are first burned to crisp. Then your ashes are crushed.
TFA is an interesting article about a physicist apparently discovering an inherent contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics. The "black hole" stuff is really just the context that led to the apparent contradiction: the real issue is much deeper than that. It's depressing that the real underlying hypothesis isn't considered newsworthy, and the editor feels the need to lead with the "black hole" stuff.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
How Would an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Die?
Fast!
The dissonance of QM and Relativity has been known for a long time, since the days of Einstein, Bohr, et al... It was not triggered by the new "firewall theory"
That would certainly change the end of the movie.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
i agree the reversed lower playfield can be a bit disorienting at first, but let's not get melodramatic -- since there are no outlanes in the gravity well, a quick SDTM drain is really the only way to die down there, and completing either bank of drop targets opens the re-entry gate anyway.
i could live a little longer in this prison
How would he die? Why the black hole would kill him, that's how!
Shouldn't we use a convicted murderer or something?
love is just extroverted narcissism
At this point all we have in conjecture as actually studying what would happen is for all intents and purposes impossible. Are you crushed, burned alive by everything else, toasted by radiation, spaghettified, or some other horrible fate?
The only thing that we /really/ know is that any possible fate you would have from falling into a black hole would be painful. Unless you are killed so quickly your body never has a chance to transmit the signals for excruciating pain. The bottom line is that we really don't know and this is something that is necessarily always going to be a theory.
Unicorns would stampede the astronaut as he enters the event horizon. There's one problem with the unicorn theory. If I'm right, then either general relativity or quantum mechanics is wrong.
He's a contradiction already since the Higgs has been found.
Shock at being in a black hole in the first place.
Shock at the radiation that blasted away her face plate.
Shock that we were able to afford to get her that far from Earth, when we're shutting down airports right now.
And then her body would be torn asunder.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Bringing up old physics thought experiments in order to throw the quantum mechanics community into an intellectual crisis.
try to avoid falling into a black hole
JADBP
I once read that if the black hole is big enough tidal forces will be minimal and you can actually cross the event horizon alive.
This theory has some merit as the universe itself is a black hole from a certain point of view.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
He'd be dead before got close to the thing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Due to the tidal grdient across your length. A large BH would have a midel tidal gradient. I dont know the size, but I think its over a trillion solar masses.
Infinite density = zero size and something with zero size no longer exists. If something has a presence in spacetime it will have some form of dimension. You can't have "something" that isn't actually there.
... He'd just red-shift more and more forever
I think that section of the universe could expect to have its Yelp page flamed.
Umm... He's a string theorist, so...
Listen to Zombie Feynman kids: Unscientific:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A. Very painfully
I read a different account 20 years ago -- the event horizon was not some infinite destruction area, it was just a one-way door. For supersized black holes the size of the solar system, the gravity gradient was so small you could easily fall in without being ripped apart.
Even larger ones at galactic cores should be even more gentle, from a gravity point of view anyway.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The astronaut would die of starvation or hypoxia long before they got to the Black Hole, given that the farthest we've sent an astronaut is 250,000 miles (a bit more than one light-second), and the nearest black hole is 1600 light years away, or 5E+10 times as far.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
The Astronaut would die through budget cuts.
The whole "what would happen to an astronaut" is the misleading sensationalist that's been pollution this site lately. It seems they're really going from "News for Nerds" to "Fox News for people who may buy computer and sciency stuff from places like Thinkgeek" (though thinkgeek is awesome BTW) in order to gain bigger audience.
End result is it drives away the core audience that used to make this site awesome, as it dumbs down the really interesting science parts beyond recognition.
The intense radiation would kill you before you even got within a light year of the event horizon.
Through the void
To be destroyed
Or is there something more?
Atomized --- at the core
Or through the Astral Door ---
To soar...
-Rush-
We should test this with hotdogs and marshmallows, and see how they taste.
sudo eat my shorts
Long before any gravitation effect.
....this so-called "astronaut" wouldn't "fall" "into" a so-called "black hole" and "die".
Oh, forget it, you couldn't possibly understand the answer even if I deigned to explaining it to you.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
If you fall into a big enough black hole, you die by running out of air in your spacesuit.
Not only is the tidal stress less, but supermassive black holes tend to clear the vicinity of stuff, so if its not 'feeding' there is no radiation to fry you either.
Since it assumes that people falling into black holes would die. Rather than appear somewhere else, go through a wormhole, or other ridiculous Sci-fi fantasy nonsense.
We all know that general relativity is wrong -- or, not perfectly right. We know that we live in a quantum universe and relativity is not a quantum theory, therefore it is "wrong" in the same way that Newtonian laws of motion are "wrong". It's an unbelievably difficult problem which science is working on. Next question.
First answer: Alone.
But I saw this rather interesting video of a lecture by Leonard Susskind : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf0D8A0jRiY ;)
It will probably not answer your question, but it's about black holes and they're very cool! Or hot. Depending on the observer
Privacy is terrorism.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Master Ken from Ameri-Do-Te said so! ... as did Einstein of course
duh. Eventually his bodt would be shredded.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A kernel is not an OS, A kernel is not an OS, A kernel is not an OS...
go read a book.
I know I'm stupid but I'll ask the obviously stupid question anyway. Where is equivalence when you are talking about falling into something like a blackhole vs accelerating in empty space? To quote TFA "binding an escaping Hawking particle to its infalling twin" so if the energy comes from falling into a blackhole which does not exist while firing your fusion thrusters for eons where is the contradiction? Speed/energy don't mean shit unless they are relative to something else. I'm sure with enough 99.9999's when you crash into something it will overcome degeneracy and make a blackhole and then you will have your equivalence firewall or not and all.
what if a microscopic black hole fell into the astronaut? See Larry Niven's short story "The Hole Man" for what might happen.
I don't believe either theory is right. When falling into a black hole one would be stretched along with space/time. To a corporeal 3rd dimensional being it would be near imperceptible. Much like a 2D drawing on a piece of paper the subject wouldn't feel the bending or stretching if a higher being were to crumple it, tearing would of course be catastrophic on all dimensions but up till that point the astronaut would feel nothing has changed as long as the fabric hasn't been distorted beyond the bounce back point. As the black hole condenses and forces time to slow the astronaut would be trapped in an ever slower and darker situation, provided he had air or a ship he would live indefinitely.
You should have read the rest of the paragraph, now you just look like a dumb shit.
I'll put the relative bits here since you son't seem to know how to use Wikipedia:
An astronaut or cosmonaut is a person trained by a human spaceflight program to command, pilot, or serve as a crew member of a spacecraft. While generally reserved for professional space travelers, the terms are sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and tourists.[1][2]
Until 2002, astronauts were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military, or by civilian space agencies. With the sub-orbital flight of the privately funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of astronaut was created: the commercial astronaut.
How does it feel to now even be able to use the most rudimentary modern technologies? Stupid. I would imagine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
excitement!
I did the same calculation, and I came to the conclusion that the black hole would burn to a crisp as soon as it touches the astronaut.
depending on your perspective either relatively fast or slow
Or, assuming the Everett Interpretation, the answer to how they would die might be "none of the above"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality
The notion in brief being that for any given situation, however probable death may be, there is some branch in which death does not occur, which consciousness would be compelled to "switch to". Though the physics depth would probably be well beyond me, I'd love to see a detailed analysis incorporating all three of these scenarios.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Slashdot : Fox News for Herds. Stuff that mattered.
Chances are before he got close enough to be ripped apart he would die from radiation...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole This is why we never get a sequel.
That was in a Futurama movie- LOVE THE TENTACLE!
(I'm being fecetious, but really why won't you all love the tentacle?)
"Falling into a Black Hole would be a Really Bad Thing"
'nuff said.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Why worry about the consequences of a thought experiment? Du-uh!
I believe "Beyond the Blue Event Horizon" (1980) explored a situation where a space craft was caught in the event horizon of a black hole.
http://threewordphrase.com/blackhole.htm
This article suggests that this theory is already refuted. Perhaps the Nature article has been several months in the pipeline and isn't up to date.
Any physicists can comment?
"I think this line is mostly filler"
The Holographic Principle allows both things to happen simultaneously:
The astronaut passes through the event horizon without noticing for sufficiently large masses, and is obliterated by increasingly dense and excited particles.
on todays Mythbusters we look at blackholes
"My God, it's full of stars!"
Why not concern yourself with something relevant, like the leading causes of death in your nation? http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
accurately define good according to a criteria and seek it out.
The thing i like most about Slashdot, is the easy access to totally unqualified opinions, whose distribution around the correct answer is an inverted bell curve.
Since we get X and GAMMA ray bursts all the time from suspected black holes when they ionize the mass whiling around them in the accretion disk, I would suspect any organic matter approaching a black hole would be irradiated into mush long before being torn apart by gravimetric tidal forces.
By boredom.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
...but apparently black holes like to play with their food.
... the people watching from the outside would die of boredom.
Blackholes, for their mass, tend to be ... well very mini.
Why don't we send an astronaut into a black hole, but tie a rope onto him or her first? Once they cross the event horizon and make some observations, we just pull the rope and drag them back to the mothership. We could make the rope out of carbon nanotubes or something to give it infinite strength.
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
You can't fall in space.
Painstakingly quickly.
I speak England very best
Sapping and impurifcation of all his of precious bodily fluids.
I thought this kind of problem was the reason the idea of a Grand Unified Theory exists. At extreme conditions like a Black Hole the theories break down and wildly disagree. Until there is some progress in one of the many variations of a GUT this is just something interesting to talk about at parties.
A Grue!.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
...depending on your point of view
for having gotten into this situation in the first place. Any jury of your peers will rule your death a suicide. Your life insurance isn't going to pay off. When you call home and say, "Houston, We have a problem." they're going to say,"No, we have a cancled program. You have some free time on your hands. Enjoy the ride."
there are now black holes ! it is a paradoxon. also when there is a black hole there hast be a white hole visible too ! this is a double paradoxon ! Prove is: astronomers are only watching into their electricity cable ! no matter, if they have mirror lenses or optical lenses . . .
...that the amount of radiation and heat black holes would create would burn the person up long before they ever got anywhere near the event horizon.
Assuming that they even survived that, the gravity pull alone would crush them like a grape a long distance away from the event horizon.
Wouldn't time slow down for the person, leaving him to starve to death?
I believe in karma, which is why, when I do something bad to people, I assume they deserve it.
If one could remotely create an identical sized black hole equidistant from your current location in an event horizon but with a counter rotation, would the forces cancel each other out allowing for a "stable" location preventing you from being sucked into either one?
Additionally if they are rotating in the same direction would you be catapulted out of the event horizons at those a fore mentioned spectacular speeds?
I am I guess making the assumption that these things actually rotate as I don't really know. I am also sort of curious about what would determine the direction of rotation in the first place, the whole toilet flush in NA VS Aus. example comes to mind...
Or it folds space and opens a portal to another dimension that resembles Hell very much.
Either way, you are going to Hell...
More like God poking holes in the universe, and it draining from high to low pressure. It is probably pretty boring after awhile.
Long before a person hit the event horizon he would be ripped apart because the difference between the accelleration of the head and feet would be too much even at a million miles away.
My dentist happens to know 104% more about black holes than you, insensitive clod!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.