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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."
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?"
The /. I knew and loved a decade ago is gone.
Hell is in the black hole. And pray you don't go there with a psychotic red robot.
Heck, considering what we know about the environments around black holes, not only will the gravitational tides kill you before you reach the event horizon, so will the radiation.
Everybody repeat after me: "Black holes ain't yer friend. Don't try to hug them, you will die."
This isn't true.
QM and *special* relativity get along just fine. When you combine them in a simple way you get predictions like antimatter, the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, and so on. If you do this in a more detailed way, using quantum field theory, you get the fantastically accurate predictions of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of quantum chromodynamics that can't be solved with pen and paper but which still gives accurate predictions when done on supercomputers, and so forth.
And there's nothing forbidding QM from playing nice with general relativity, either; we just don't know how it works yet. There are some models, like lattice quantum gravity, that seem quite promising.
If the astronaut gets across the event horizon, then he will never die relative to us. So, there really isn't a problem here as far as I can tell.
Heck, considering what we know about the locations of black holes and the speed of manmade spacefcraft, old age will probably kill you before you get close enough to notice the gravity.
Everybody repeat after me: "Space is big. Don't mind Sarten-X, he is a jackass."
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
They've found numerous stellar objects of various sizes that conform to the preditions of black holes. (Mass, diameter, etc) Though none have been directly observed, their 'feeding' does generate a lot of energy that is detected when something falls in. Just recently one that had been relatively quiet for some time gave of a nice 'burp' of radiation as it apparently 'ate' a planet.
:D
Have we been to a black hole? No.
Have we taken photos of an actual black hole? No.
Have we seen gravitational effects that look exactly like what a black hole should have? Yes.
Do those gravitational effects calculate out as something of several to millions of solar masses in a tiny volume that can't exist in any non-black hole way that we are aware of? Yes.
Have we seen the radiation from an accretion disk falling into and being destroyed by a black hole as predicted? Yes.
Is a black hole what astrophysicists think it is? Probably.
Is a black hole what non-scientists (hollywood, general public, dentists, etc) think it is? Probably not.
Do you really exist? This is about black holes, but your existence is only a bit less theoretical than that of a black holes, though some of the specifics of either may not be what is generally thought about them.
And no, a black hole is not god dividing by zero. It's more likely an alien mad scientist multiplying by the square root of negative zero.
Actually, it is also possible that there is no such thing as a black hole - but cetain parts of the universe just suck. I have known some towns like that.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
He would die of shock [...] And then her body would be torn asunder.
So you think a black hole would accomplish a gender change on the subject? Interesting theory.
While yes, one of the things you would have to deal with is the incredibly hot material swirling around the event horizon which, in and of itself, should produce enough X-rays to fry you, I think this article is actually talking more about an actual characteristic of the event horizon, as opposed to what is in orbit around it, or even what is infalling.
In short, space is supposed to look the same to an observer no matter what side of the event horizon they are on. Instead, a special condition where you smack into something that is there beyond what you would expect from a black hole with infalling matter occurs. That "wall of fire" obviously consists of stuff that has entered the event horizon of the black hole, but it is structured in such a way as to form a highly energetic barrier that should not be there based on our current understanding of relativity or quantum mechanics.
Assuming you're not trolling, that's a nice story, but that's not how science works.
The trouble is that "what we know about black holes" is all theoretical and mathematical.
Usually, the first step in science is to observe something. In the case of black holes, our knowledge of their existence can be traced back to a few experiments, which provided pretty solid evidence against the prevailing theories of aether. The observation that doesn't match the expectation means that the theories aren't right, and must be changed.
In fact, many of today's experiments are simply re-running old trials, but with more precise technology. Rather than dropping rocks off a tower, we can measure how fast individual atoms fall, giving us a more exact understanding of gravity. Usually the results are a perfect match for what's expected, but sometimes they aren't.
Black holes were invented to explain present-day theories about the motion of stars and galaxies.
Next comes the theory. Starting from the results of those experiments, Einstein hypothesized his theories of relativity, which are really little more than a collection of relationships derived from the assumption that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. His theories explained the results of previous experiments, and importantly, provided a set of formulas that can be used to make predictions for future experiments.
Mathematics are very useful in describing measured experiments and observations in the physical universe. As soon as mathematics and computer simulations go beyond what is actually observed and measured, it no longer describes the real world were living in.
The relationships in the physical world are described with mathematics. Sometimes, when math is insufficient to easily describe a particular relationship, new mathematical forms are invented to accommodate the real world. Ultimately, though, every physicist knows that the mathematical models do not prescribe reality, but describe our understanding of it. Again, we use those models to predict the outcome of future experiments.
At the center of these hypothetical, theoretical black holes is this mathematical entity that has been called a "singularity". This is another mathematical fiction that can't exist in the known universe.
That depends on the rules of the known universe. in 1915, Karl Schwarzchild transformed Einstein's theories of relativity into a form that would require black holes. This means that Einstein's formulas can only be correct if the universe allows black holes. If the universe does not allow black holes, then Einsteins formulas must be wrong - though less wrong than the aether theory they replaced.
Perhaps it is time to examine some of these widely held theories that require these mathematical fictions.
That's what experiments are for.
No one has ever directly observed a black hole and thereby shown that these things even exist in the real world.
Black holes have been observed many times.
In 1929 an astronomer named Edwin Hubble discovered that "red shift" of distant galaxies. Then he made the assumption (belief, faith) about the cau
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.