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."
From the arxiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.4706.pdf
FTFY: and getting mass to 1/3 the speed of light is currently impossible
Actually, it's very possible; about every accelerator in the world does it regularly.
Having said that, getting a macroscopic mass to 1/3 the speed of light is currently impossible. Well, at least when considered from the frame of reference in which it originally was at rest.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
First off, New Horizons is travelling at 35,000 MPH, not kph. Second, those escape velocities would be at the surface of the body for unpowered bodies. Escape velocity decreases with distance from the body. It's possible to simply accelerate directly away from an object and never reach speeds anywhere close to escape velocity, until you are far enough away that you have simply exceeded (that now much lower) escape velocity threshold. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Better known as 318230.
Fortunately, in physics, nearly everyone posts a manuscript version on arxiv.org (i.e. the same article but with the authors' own formatting, rather than the journal's layout). And indeed that is the case here.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10