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
I love how we treat blackholes specially.
Why shouldn't we? They're extremely interesting.
For some reason, we teach kids and adults that blackholes are "evil" and suck up everything
At least that's less wrong than declaring that:
getting mass to 1/3 the speed of light is absolutely impossible.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The nearest black hole is 1600 light-years away
Famous last words...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Interstellar racism, you think?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Black hole firewalls don't really exist.
Indeed. A firewall would be useless. Any virus trying to penetrate the event horizon would be turned into harmless spaghetti code anyway.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Well, the firewall rules for a black hole are easy: You let every packet in, but none out.
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
"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