Why is nobody talking about how
marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured spacetime
is such a fucking cool sentence
I’m just excited to see people having knock down drag-out fights about how scientifically accurate tumblr prose is on a comm that’s not my responsibly to moderate!
Keep in mind that all the cliches about black holes are about non-rotating black holes, which don’t exist in reality. In reality, a spinning black hole has a ring singularity, not a point, and behaves much weirder and even less intuitively than the hypothetical non-rotating counterpart as it smears out spacetime into taffy.
Teachers: You can’t divide by zero.
Nature: Hey guys, check this shit out.There are math models where dividing by zero makes sense. It’s just that those models don’t suit our world for now.
Our hopes and expectations == Black holes and revelations.
And the superstars sucked into the supermassive
I’m not an astrophysicist, but that ends up being the weird perception thing about them, right? Mostly they’re like a star of the same mass, and then a few will get really big and be at the center of a galaxy, but the perception is that of a natural disaster.
Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet? NBD. An object of the same mass but it’s smaller so it doesn’t shine? People picture it as being more immediately violent for some reason because the “light can’t escape” thing sounds so wild.
Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.
It’s a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.
also the way they bend light, a proper physically simulated depiction of a black hole is so fucking cool because it just kinda intuitively looks like it’s so heavy it’s bending spacetime around it!
Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet?
The sun isn’t heavy enough to go supernova. (Unless it has a companion, but there’s no evidence of one so far.)
It will still expand and shed enough stuff to effectively blanch whatever part of the solar system it doesn’t actually engulf, though.
It doesn’t even have to go supernova to kill everything, which is kind of the point.
To be fair I think “light can’t escape” thing really just is that wild, it’s pretty captivating. The idea of it being the death of a star, one of the most important things to all life we know about, only adds to that sense. Stars are massive billion-year explosions, yes, but they also bring warmth and light and beauty. Black holes are the death of all of that, even if it’s not technically more dangerous from the same distance
Especially since we still don’t know how information preservation works in a black hole. There are ideas yes but we still aren’t sure if any of them are even right.
It’s not that light can’t escape that is scary it’s that the future of anything passing the event horizon changes to eventually end up in the singularity. Black holes are not just death, most of the things in the universe are death to us, black holes are literally the end of time.
They are like stars in the sense of orbital mechanics.
But a star can be completely understood by the laws of physics we know. While a black hole breaks our understanding and we have no idea what’s going on in there.
It’s the fear of the unknown.
Just FYI Superman has survived a black hole because the plot demanded it.
Tell me you don’t understand black holes using a lot of words.
As far as gravity goes they are equivalent to the star that they collapsed from and just as deadly.
The difference is that you can get that much closer before “impacting” with it, but you and superman would be fucked pretty much at the same distance from it.
And I think you need a lot less than 300 writers to conjure an idea that leverage our fantasy in more and better ways.
And an infinitely dense point in spacetime doesn’t necessarily exist: it’s just what general relativity predicts is at the center of a black hole.
The last time our physical model of the universe predicted an infinite value, we ended up discovering new physics eventually (the ultraviolet catastrophe). (Edit: ultrasound was a typo).
And an infinitely dense point in spacetime doesn’t necessarily exist: it’s just what general relativity predicts is at the center of a black hole.
If the singularity at the center of a black hole didn’t exist, and was just extremely dense instead, would all of the other properties that we know is true about black holes be able to exist? For example we know that Sag A* and that one other black hole we ‘imaged’ give off no light, would that still be possible without a singularity?
You’d also likely burn to death pretty early on in the process. Like, the moment you cross the event horizon, instant death.
Actually you wouldn’t notice anything special crossing the event horizon. You’d just continue to fall.
thinking about the universe is already traumatizing
Where does it end? How are we floating? What if we fall? Where does it come from?
I don’t think about that a lot so it doesn’t give me anxiety
that’s the fun part, everything is always falling!
“marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured space time” is a great title for a progressive rock or technical death metal song
graph function singularities exist as physical features in our world
Do they, though…?
As I (mis?)understand it, as a massive star begins to collapse, getting denser and denser, the gravitational gradient gets steeper and steeper… and time (from the perspective of an outside observer) gets slower and slower… to the point that, from our point of view, the full collapse (or maybe even any collapse below the Schwarzschild radius?) hasn’t happened yet, and won’t happen until the extremely distant future, beyond the end of the universe…
So, in that sense, from the point of view of “our world”, no singularities (except possibly the big bang) would ever exist (yet), all of them being censored not only by event horizons, but by being shoved into the perpetually far future, beyond time itself…
And, speaking about event horizons, isn’t the whole “light isn’t fast enough to escape” concept a misinterpretation of sorts…? As I (again mis?)understand it, it’s not a matter of speed, but of geometry… The way space-time is twisted in such a gravitational gradient, once you get past the event horizon there are no longer any directions pointing towards the outside.
Which is another from of cosmic censorship (or a different effect or interpretation of the above), preventing anything inside the event horizon from causally interacting with the outside universe…
So, if these singularities are hidden beyond sight, causally, visually, and geometrically isolated from the rest of the universe, and perpetually shoved into the far future… can they really be said to exist in our world…?
(Of course there’s always the big bang, but we can’t really observe that one, only its effects, and it’s not necessarily exactly what the original post was talking about anyway…)
I think you explain it pretty well, but one thing to add. Due to the General Relativity and thus spacetime it is actually not directions that all point toward the singularity, but as soon as you cross the event horizon all of your future becomes the Singularity, not as a point in space, but a point in time
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/lightcone.html
This points at that, you would also need to be able to travel faster than light and that would make you time travel backwards in time
all of your future becomes the Singularity
There is some small burn-off Hawking radiation that escapes and gradually reduces the mass (and information content) of the black hole. Some of that would be you.
My understanding is that the singularity is not proven to exist and many physicists believe it is an artifact of our incorrect understanding of the physics involved.
Well, what exactly is inside the event horizon is unproven because we cannot possibly look. All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though, and we know that there are things out there that behave just like our models of black holes predict. It’s an incomplete understanding rather than a necessarily incorrect one. If it is something else, it’d have to be something that looks more or less exactly like a black hole to an outside observer
All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though
You know, except for the actual singularity which has no interpretable meaning in physics
The comment above was about the singularity, so “the rest” clearly does not include the singularity
I don’t think “no interpretable meaning in physics” is a reasonable description, though. In classical mechanics, sure, but we’ve got plenty of physics that doesn’t work in classical mechanics
okay what does infinite density mean in avant-garde mechanics?
Non-classical mechanics includes things like quantum physics and (depending on who you ask) special relativity. They feel extremely counterintuitive but they provide pretty reliable explanations for how things work. That infinite density doesn’t make sense in our regular understanding of the world doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a useful model. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true, of course, but the fact that it seems weird isn’t really important. It might just be that physics inside a black hole permit for something that we can best describe as infinitely dense
All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though
What is the entire problem, because all of the rest of the physics don’t get you coherent answers around a black hole.
In one, you mean? They get you perfectly fine answers around one
I would think an object of extremely high density could be difficult to distinguish from a point of infinite density, especially given the nature of the event horizon.
I’m not saying the models are definitely wrong but usually when one of your terms goes to infinity it is a good reason to be skeptical.
There are no naked singularities
But I read there were naked singularities in my area.
Plus, black holes may do contain universes. This year there was some evidence pointing that our universe is actually trapped inside one… ref: https://futurism.com/universe-trapped-inside-black-hole
I suppose cosmic horror elder gods like Cthulhu and such are not all that far removed from the idea of a black hole. Particularly the ones that are less involved with Earth than Cthulhu is. Nobody is ramming a black hole with a fishing boat. But the early writing on them was done at about the same time as a lot of the foundational theoretical work on black holes (not the earliest stuff but I can believe that the writers didn’t know about it)
Also, extremely pedantic note - black holes were predicted by looking at what happens in the math at extreme densities, long before black holes were actually observed in space
And some of the scientists who worked on those early calculations assumed it meant the physics was incomplete!
If I remember Lovecraft correctly the whole idea was that human mind can’t comprehend such things. And black holes fit very nicely.
black holes seem pretty comprehensible to me? like there’s a lot of math and programming that’s way harder to wrap your head around
Now get this: some scientists think black holes might have hair.
But can you comb it all into the same direction?
yes because they have a bald spot due to high testosterone levels
Everything was hairy back in the 70’s.
I’ve heard that ‘our reality is made of math’ before. Does this mean that we do in fact live in a simulation, even if that simulation wasn’t necessarily programmed by ‘higher dimensional’ beings?
If that is the case, could we conceivably ‘hack’ the universal code and unlock cheat mode?
We don’t need to “live in a simulation” for “our reality to be made of math”. Math could very well exist outside of anything, as a formal concept. This is the old debate asking whether math is invented or discovered. If it is discovered, then it can exist without any reality, as a pure abstract concept.
It’s confusing. I don’t understand what the difference is between something which is made of ‘a pure abstract concept’, specifically math, and a simulation- which is also made out of math.
I’m not saying it’s something ran on a computer somewhere, just that the abstract concepts that make up our universe, if it is “made of math”, clearly has rules that it obeys- like the speed of light in a vacuum or the other constants. Which would seem to be analogous to parameters in a more traditional simulation. If ‘math’ is something that exists independent of sentient beings, couldn’t whatever that is be the ‘thing’ that the ‘simulation’ is ran on?
I guess where I’m getting hung up is the idea that the universe can be ‘made of’ something that has no ‘reality’. Am I just misunderstanding what it’s meant by ‘made of math’? Like even if math is ‘discovered’, how would that be any different than us inventing it, if it exists ‘without any reality’?
To be fair, there is lots of stuff I don’t understand, but I am trying- go easy on me.
I was being cheeky about the ‘cheat mode’ thing (unless it’s real then I’m in).
I feel like there is a misunderstanding in this thread.
The universe is described by math. Math itself is also very fundamental though.
However even the Singularities are disputed and generally not liked by physicist. We try to find other explanations for how black holes work (lots of papers on this). Moreover, we never really have a singularity, but ringularities, as all black holes rotate changing the singularity to a singularity (they probably also have a charge but that is a different matter).
And on the other hand, if you are a follower of the simulation argument (I know a few physicists that are) there are also counter arguments against this (which I believe are more likely).
Don’t worry, it’s confusing for everyone (including me), this is a very fascinating, yet forever (I think) out of human reach, question.
What I was trying to say is that our entire universe/reality could be like a “conway game of life” : In this “game”, every step is fully determined by the previous one, in order to know what the next step is going to be, we human run a simulation, on a computer, or on paper or whatever… But is it to say that all the future steps don’t exist before we “simulate”, we could consider that, since they are all predetermined, the steps exist even if we don’t know what they are, they could simply be. Just like the number “1” could be a fundamental truth, that could exist outside of any universe.
If mathematics is discovered rather than invented, then that would imply that it exists without anyone or anything, an undiscovered theorem would still be true. The universe could be a big mathematical game of life that exists because it cannot be any other way, and that is fully determined. Then again this could also not be. Who knows !
Stephen Wolfram is a very controversial physicist, who explored those abstract and unprovable concepts, even though his statements should be taken with a grain of salt, it is nonetheless very interesting philosophically: he came up with the concept of the ruliad and the idea of computable irreducibility, if you want to explore these philosophical questions you can look it up, he has a few ted talks and YouTube videos where he details his thought. I cannot stress enough that he should be listened to with extreme skepticism, this is not science “yet”, and it might never be.
