Slashdot Mirror
How an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Would Die Part 2
First time accepted submitter ydrozd writes "Until recently, most physicists believed that an observer falling into a black hole would experience nothing unusual when crossing its event horizon. As has been previously mentioned on Slashdot, there is a strong argument, initially based on observing an entangled pair at the event horizon, that suggests that the unfortunate observer would instead be burned up by a high energy quanta (a.k.a "firewall") just before crossing the black hole's event horizon. A new paper significantly improves the argument by removing reliance on quantum entanglement. The existence of black hole "firewalls" is a rare breakthrough in theoretical physics."
Technically if you cross the event horizon and if there is no firewall, then your family will die long before you do. So, should they set up funeral for millions of years in the future. And if you cross the event horizon, should you mourn them immediately?
Why hasn't science answered these questions?
The only new information cited is behind a $25 pay wall. Kill it with fire.
I still say she/he would be stretched out into spaghetti.
From the arxiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.4706.pdf
From a surfeit of "would"s, apparently.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wonder how you setup a static nat on a Black Hole...
hmmm
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
How Would I Get Through A Day Would No Slashdot?
I guess samzenpus can't read either, so its too much to expect him to actually proofread the title and summary?
It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden ...oh wait, it IS the fall that kills you.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4706
How did the mods miss this? Hiding public research behind a paywall is (morally) a crime.
Former VP Dick Cheney for the brave and important mission
he might be frozen, burned, alive and dead all at same time.
If the astronaut would be very small he might notice nothing.
But even a moon too close to a plent gets eaten by the gravitational forces - and that would not be different from an astronaut approaching a (much smaller) black hole.
Wasn't the event horizon of an earth-mass black hole about 1 cm in diameter?
The funny thing is . . . if someone announced a space program to toss an astronaut down a black hole . . . there would be plenty of volunteers for the mission.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The gravitational force on physical objects would squeeze his body to a spaghetti far before the event horizon.
Hopefully quickly.
What would kill you? Crushing gravity, intense radiation. The exact manner of death is not that interesting. A bit like a cross between a snuff film and arguing which way your bones would be crushed and mangled if you stuck them in a blender. It's the sci-fi snuff writers that want to know.
Now if you're interested in what's happening at or near the event horizon, it's perfectly reasonable to examine that.
Black hole firewalls don't really exist.
Here's a summary:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6334
and the long paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6335
Resolving the issue.
In short, the black hole paradox doesn't exist and can be explained.
Motl has a really nice summary as well:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2013/10/raju-papadodimas-isolate-reasons-why.html
I'm sort of lost here. Granted I know very little about this subject, but what I do know is black holes are far away. And entangled pairs are really fucking small. So how the hell can we see entangled pairs at the event horizon of a black hole? Seems to me if we can see stuff that small, that far away, finding planets similar to ours would be easy, since they are very very very much bigger.
Be seeing you...
How can "the observer" be burnt, when the observer can be any object at any particular time and space? One can observe from any angle or reflection hence be anywhere. You don't know if someone really dies or lives. if the black hole is as misunderstood as how it is so far, we don't know enough to know the answer to this, how come a conclusion can be reached from so little information? if he is dead, the most probably he wouldn't know. Radiation will not burnt it, if light itself can not escape a black hole, how can information reaching the brain give any notion of pain if it probably got discarded in some random [or not so random] motion? Plus how can the radiation escape to burn, if the event horizon is absorbing anything, it makes sense that it will suck out even information, so how can your brain interpret you are burning? In fact, it can't even see it is burning, because to see, you need to have reflection, this will defeat the theory that a blackhole absorbs even light.
Bazinga.
But would he chuck wood?
We can cloak light. We can cloak magnetism. Both recent developments, both recently far fetched science-fiction. As a thought experiement at least, what if we could cloak an object - perhaps even one containing a human - from gravity and then send that object on a trajectory into a black hole. This assumes that the high levels of radiation and firewall have also been overcome.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The nearest black hole is 1600 light-years away
That's the nearest one that we can see. However we only detect them by seeing emissions from the matter which falls into them. There could easily be one nearer that is nowhere near any matter. The only way we would then be able to detect it is by its gravitational influence on the solar system.
However, regardless of this, if you actually made it to a Black Hole the tidal forces would rip you apart well before you close enough to worry about massive time dilation effects. The closer you get to the black hole the stronger the field which means that, assuming you went in head first, the gravitational pull on your head would be a lot greater than the pull on your feet...you can imagine what the result will be when this force difference becomes large enough.
How about we send someone with a live video feed into a black hole and settle this whole question?
Roche limit describes the maximum characteristic length of a gravitationally bound body in orbit of another object based on gravitational gradient. Basically, no larger objects (of similar density) are expected to form at any particular orbit level. It's not a perfect fit for something that is chemically bound, but you can still derive a form of it using other physical constants of the right units. Yield strength, for instance.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
you are just posting competing hypothesis.
Sorry guys, it's not romantic at all,
the astronaut would die or be dead anyway, if the black hole is
a.) in absolute Vacuum, nerve destruction by hard gamma radiation+particle radiation, even his spacesuit would not protect him
Why ? -> gamma radiation black body radiation, continuum source -> temperature -> high temperature -> short wave lengths -> hard gamma radiation
Where comes the radiation from, his own atoms off course !
Absolute Vacuum + Astronaut = not a vacuum anymore.
b.) in interstellar space, he would be even dead before hand, because if there are particlesm as there are within interstellar space, these would be
converted to gamma or X-ray radiation
In this case the astronaut should try to adjust his flightpath colinear to the axis of rotation because then the addtional synchrotron radiation from the acretion disc would not add up to his dosage
c.) .. this is rediculous
if he would dive in feet forward he can
if there is a tiny black hole, there are particles, because black holes suck them up, even in the outer space beyond our solar system,
there is no absolute vacuum (mark absolute in addition to vacuum is a double of nothing, vacuum is absolute, interstellar space has no vacuum!)
because you would at least count one atom/molecule within a cubicmeter, and space has many cubic meters !!
Short form of E=mc is if you smash a particle it will emit a certain energy equivalent to it's mass, and energy equals photons as c is constant you need to charge up the lambda, to extrem short periods this would equal tooo .. yes hard gamma radiation !
Planck !!
This is why the romulans should have won the war, because they use a singularity energy source ... and well this is nothing else than a black hole,
you feed it matter it will give off energy, EXTREMLY effcient.
Need proof ? .. and well this is our galactic center we all circle around, and it's a black hole.
Lock at the sky, target cygnus X1 - a X-ray source
If you would beam an astronaut within a 1km radius .. he would be dead on arrival, as a human being that would be subjected to a gamma radiation source .. then so be it.
like these used to sterilize special items, ok if you count after 3 seconds as not DOA
And how would Slashdot would look if would editors would edit?
Assuming you could get to a black hole before dying of old age.....
Gamma Radiation would kill you long before a quantum firewall or tidal forces.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Please remember that there is basically no experimental evidence for any of this speculation. No. Experimental. Evidence. There is barely evidence for general relativity type black holes*, no evidence at all for Hawking radiation, and thus of course no evidence for the theoretical infrastructure built on top of Hawking radiation.
And, plenty of (theoretical) papers have looked at this and come to alternate conclusions.
I suspect that when we actually do start experimenting with black hole event horizons directly we will find that some crucial fact was missed which invalidates all of this theoretical work, but I could just be in a grumpy mood.
* There is plenty of evidence that there are very dense collections of matter in the centers of galaxies and other locations in the universe, dense enough that at least some of them have to be black holes in general relativity, but that is not proof that the black holes predicted by General Relativity actually do exist, even though it is very reasonable and convenient to label these objects "black holes" for most purposes, . (The issue is that other theories of gravity have different types of black holes, or none at all, and G.R. cannot be regarded as experimentally proven in this regime.) Only recently has there been any direct evidence for an event horizon, one of the key predictions for a general relativistic type black hole, and we are still waiting on the detection of gravitational radiation from a newly formed black hole, which is what it will take for this issue to really be nailed down.
I've always sided against Hawking on this...Susskind was right
I think you actually agree with me, b/c this is the same as the EH 'obliterating' it...
I never said it was "lost" i said it was "obliterated"
the **way** the energy is dispersed across the EH preserves the 2nd Law...the conflict over whether information is 'lost' or 'not lost' is a fault of Hawking-style information theory. Hawking (as is his custom) was making a distinction w/o a difference.
something can be obliterated without the information being 'lost'....we watch it obliterated into 'nothing' (aka the Evebt Horizon)...yes, you could call the state of the matter immediately before it becomes 'obliterated' as a 'hologram'...but it doesn't disprove what I'm saying at all
in this sense, a 'black hole' truly is 'nothing'...that's why if TFA is right, black holes are essentially bubbles of 'nothing' in the quantum foam of the universe
Thank you Dave Raggett
sorry...one last thing...
when matter hits the Event Horizon, it is obliterated into 'nothing' and scattered across the EH...
one thing I forgot to mention is that, again, the 2nd Law is not violated in my view b/c the **black hole gets bigger** as it obliterates matter
Thank you Dave Raggett
Surely one would burn already by the radiation and intense temperature of the accretion disk. The magnetic fields of a spinning black hole might be fun to experiment as well: The Hole: "Hmm, there seems to be something different about you today, fellow space traveler. What could it be? *Slush!*"
If someone falls into a black hole, is their soul stuck there for the 62 zillion years it takes the black hole to evaporate?
If you pushed someone into a black hole, could you beat the murder rap by pointing out that he still hadn't finished falling in, from the jury's reference frame?
If you modified Shrõdinger's experiment so that the decay of an atom dropped the cat into a black hole rather than gassing it, then put a cat in the box to create a superposition of "the cat is in the black hole" and "the cat is not in the black hole", is it possible for the superposition to collapse to "the cat is not in the black hole"?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Maybe out of sheer aggravation that people can't write a sentence of English properly, even when it's a headline on one of the world's most visited sites.
... than to be an adventurer who is the first to enter a black hole.
*Note: Yes, horrible Skyrim joke reference that is completely out of date... but someone had to say it... (grin)
it *seems* that this argument assumes that there is indeed a black hole information paradox requiring black holes to emit hawking radiation; if one assumes a model of black holes as fuzzballs which present no problem wrt information loss (a) do black holes still radiate and (b) would any firewall still exist?
There are so many things wrong with this article. First you'd be torn apart by tidal forces. Long before you got anywhere near it. If you somehow survived that, then time would slow as you approached. The wavelength of light would stretch due to time dilation, and the light hitting you from stars in the sky would shorten, so much so that you'd be roasted by high energy radiation. Lastly, it would take a very very very long time to actually reach the event horizon. As time slowed the victim would likely see the end of the universe behind him.
it *seems* that this (and the earlier) argument assumes that there is indeed a black hole information paradox requiring black holes to emit hawking radiation; if one assumes a model of black holes as fuzzballs which present no problem wrt information loss (a) do black holes still radiate and (b) would any firewall still exist?
fuzzballs as opposed to black holes would lead to a decidedly less "neat" version of nature which unfortunately implies that the fuzzball theory is probably correct. usually the boring answer is the right one.
I always assumed the astronaut would be ripped apart by tidal forces long before reaching the event horizon.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The crappy grammar would kill him before he even would got there.
Heart attack.
Assuming you could get to a black hole before dying of old age.....
That was my point - there might be one close enough that you might imagine getting to it within your lifetime because we can't see it. Such a BH would not emit gamma radiation because there is no matter falling into it which is where the gamma emission comes from. Indeed if it was emitting gamma radiation we would see it because of that.
Gamma Radiation would kill you long before a quantum firewall or tidal forces.
The only radiation a BH in the absence of matter emits is Hawking radiation and, while I'm not an astrophysicist and don't have the precise numbers to hand, I believe that is incredibly little and almost certainly enough that it would be easy to shield against although I don't think you would even need to.
The astronauts freeze dried ice-cream would come through intact. Didn't you ever wonder why the stuff in the museum seems like it's been around for trillions of years?
The existence of black hole "firewalls"...
This is the firewall I have been wanting for my home LAN.
But I'm guessing it may be tricky to implement without sucking everything out of my network, including me...
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Nobody has done any actual science here at all... it's all just daydreaming by theoretical physicists and astronomers. Have any of them actually sent ANYTHING into the vicinity of a block hole? Nope. All we have here is conjecture and EXTREMELY remote imaging of distant astronomical bodies and activity. There's no actual experimentation, no actual data, no practical application (other than published papers, peer acclaim (by other daydreamers) and dreams of research grant money, no doubt)
I call "no clothes!" on this emperor and call for some actual science, backed-up by experiments and real data, that leads to practical applications of at least some minor benefit to somebody. Lacking that, these people ought to take-up some productive career, like "street sweeper" or "sanitation engineer" or retail sales "associate" and leave the "science" thing to serious people doing actual serious important work.
Well, the thing about a black hole - it's main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the color of space, your basic space color - is it's black. So how are you supposed to see them?
(If you don't get this reference you need to stop what you are doing and go watch Red Dwarf now).
Launch a suitably instrumented satellite into orbit around earth. Crank up the LHC, creating a small black hole. This will rapidly consume the earth. Since the mass of this black hole would be the same as that of the earth, the satellite's orbit would not be affected. The satellite could then make numerous measurements of phenomena occurring at the event horizon.
OK, repeatability would be a problem.
Have gnu, will travel.
There's a write up for the Firewall theory at http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/06/05/firewalls-burning-brightly/
And as you guys are commenting about what the family should do ... I do not think that guy would last that long because, according to the firewall theory, once he hit the event horizon the entanglement would occur
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'm going to assume some things that are pretty well accepted by the physics community. Of course, one can always find people with opposing viewpoints.
I attended a talk on the firewall issue by Leonard Susskind last week, and he started with some interesting comments on the whole "what do theoretical physicists do?" question.
He gave four cases:
The conflict with firewalls is that quantum entanglement (which has held up very well so far) shouldn't cause the equivalence principal to be violated (this, too, has done very well experimentally). The equivalence principal states that an accelerated observer, absent other information, can't tell if their in a rocket or standing on a surface in a gravitational field. Implied by this is the "no drama" notion that says that nothing interesting should happen when one falls through an event horizon, which itself is a smooth bit of space-time. (I'm assuming here, for the sake of a macroscopic observer, that it's a big enough black hole that tides don't come into play until well towards the central singularity and that the surroundings aren't full of super heated, radiating matter.) The firewall hypothesis arises as a possible solution to what happens (very) late in the evolution of a black hole when most of the matter still inside the horizon is entangled with matter that's been emitted as Hawking radiation. The equivalence principal says that a firewall, being very dramatic, shouldn't happen. This firewall isn't the same as the very, very late stage of a black hole when the Hawking radiation is so intense that nothing is likely to get past and make its way into the hole. Maldacena and Susskind seek to resolve this and have come up with the notion that EPR bridges (entanglement) and wormholes (general relativity) are the same thing. (Now before everyone gets going about wormholes, these aren't expected to be anything more than a sort of identity mapping between entangled particles.) I don't claim to follow everything about how the initial entanglement described in the paper actually comes about, but the overall argument has a feeling of making sense, and a room full of gray haired physicists didn't tear it down. Susskind also pointed out that if black hole horizons become messy, so do other kinds of horizon such as cosmological ones, adding further inelegant complications for the theorists.
The
Credo sim. - I think I am.
Theorizing about falling through the event horizon is not in the realm of science because it is not testable even in principle. You might say that you can test it by doing it but then you'd be bringing religious theories about life after death into science as well.
A blackhole is often defined by its Gravity, a signature that an object exists in our Universe.
Time was recently speculated on a Quantum level doesn't exist, it is an artifact from the perspective of one-half of a Quantum entangled pair. Observing both pairs reveals Time doesn't exist, its definitive the wave function is merely a description of all the states the pair ever occupy.
Separating a pair by space does not matter, their entangled state means they remain entangled.
Matter, anti-matter pair production speculated upon by Paul Dirac appears to produce matter from photons spontaneously emitting radiation at an event horizon. This is the origin of the firewall proposition. Another view is that conglomerations of matter in a space represent an especially complex region of space where particles of matter violate the local rules for less dense regions of space.. which is nonsense.. what they do however is they represent especially rare instances where the equations of description become "higher order" somewhat like particle accelerators and reveal subtleties with enhanced detail.
So if Gravity creates this complex space, in which higher orders can be reached, and uncommon things can occur.. why would we assume that something as simple as a "firewall" would even apply? I'm not proposing the scene at the end of 2001: a Space Odyssey but if you could make such a voyage.. I think it more likely the fragments of atoms or fragments of particles might end up scattered over a vast amount of space and time.. rather like a Mirror.. the event horizon would probably "entangle" the matter with a great deal of other matter across non-extant time and space
Good research..
depending on your point of view it'll either be relatively slow, or relatively fast
Quanta is plural. You cannot have "a quanta" any more than you can have "a mice".
In fact the word is essentially meaningless within the OP, but hey, it sounds all sciencey and shit, so let's whack it in anyway.
I'm still down with Kenja's idea with the monkeys.
"Locate a black hole and start shooting monkeys at it! "Science can not progress without heaps [of monkeys]"
Thanks Kenja, for your input.
If you want to show how clever your are, mod parent '+1 Funny'.
Utter stupidity. Know what intense gravity vectoring towards a point does?? And spacesip getting close to a adaquately sized blackhole will be crushed long (relatively) before being near any event horizon (strange isnt this effect an event??)
Of course it will happen with great suddenness so probably wont mean much of a difference to those experiencing it.
Ok, So Now We know What Happens to Astronauts. What happens to Plumbers who fall into black holes? Rabbis? Mailmen, etc. There's a lot more research to be done here.
you don't have to be near a blackhole to have it kill you.
consider this experiment:
tie a long rope around an astronauts waist. throw the other rope end into a far away blackhole.
instant lightspeed. and (probably) half an astronaut.
An unfortunate astronaut falling into a black hole would probably die due to different gravitational pulls acting on his body. The parts of his body closer to the singularity would get ripped off (or more likely, the spacesuit would rupture) as he approached the singularity.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
... would it be the same for a cosmonaut as an astronaut?
If falling in a space-suit how many hours of air does it have? How close to the black hole would he have to dropped of for the air to last all the way to the event-horizon? What ship could take him that close before being ripped to shreads?
My guess is that he would die from exposure since the pressurized suit would spring a leak long before the human body would be powerful enough to kill a human. And even if we managed to build a suit capable of withstanding these forces the human would be ripped to shreds extremely slowly (because of the time-dilation he would experience) long before he would come close to the black hole.
General Relativity states that nothing can cross a black hole's event horizon. How can anything in the article be believe when it has such an obvious error?
Don't stop where the ink does.
There is no such thing as a "breakthrough in theoretical physics" since it's all speculative nonsense. "Black hole" is an absurd fiction, not something real you can "fall into". Physics is about real objects, not imaginary ones.
Someone falling into a black hole would die as they approached the event horizon by being ripped apart by tidal forces (for those of you who skipped science, those are the forces that created Saturn's rings).
mark
"Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space -- the color of space, your basic space color -- is it's black. So how are you supposed to see them?" - Holly
Remember that when one is looking for a black hole and in the relative vicinity of a black hole, one's flashlight beam will CURVE towards the black hole, then be pulled into it. At this point one should slam it in Reverse and go ANYWHERE else rather quickly.
A person would not even get close to the event horizon of a black hole while still alive, and in one piece.
It would of been nice to have the world lean away from ignorance, and greed. If humanity could of gone down the path that Nikola Tesla was trying to show. We would have a much better understanding of the universe. I believe that Hawking is like Einstein. They both get to much credit, and they have no where near the intellect and understanding of the workings of the universe. Compared to Telsa, and who knows how many others that have been forgotten and pushed into silence.
The black hole is inside the black box.