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The way they are depicted in fiction is so wrong tho.
To be fair even our attempts at describing a technically possible but implausably simple version of a blackhole are essentially educated speculation. Although worth noting that black hole like objects did appear in fiction before they were discovered IRL.
Edit: To clarify our current models tend to involve non-rotating and un-charged black holes and even then there’s significant conjecture as to what happens beyond the event horizon.
You should say which appearance you have in mind. Year and author.
What do you mean? We understand them well enough that we can predict the gravitational waves of a black hole merger.
IIRC, the biggest uncertainty is about the singularity. I don’t know if it’s still true, but my understanding was that the consensus is that it isn’t really a true point of infinitely dense mass. That is how our current models say it must be, but many assumed our current models are incomplete and that more accurate ones will show that it must have some volume. And given the extreme nature of them, any updates to our models might have some significant repercussions in other aspects of them too.
So far, we haven’t seen a physical infinity in any part of the universe, so if our models produce a point of infinite anything, they’re probably wrong.
Interstellar enters the chat.
The black hole’s visual depiction was fine in that movie, sure. But the way the characters interacted with it still made no sense.
organ music intensifies
I would 100% volunteer to be the first person to cross the event horizon of a spinning supermassive black hole, just to see what’s on the other side.
Like yeah it’s guaranteed to be a one-way trip and probably a horrible death, but there’s also the possibility that it’s actually a gateway to alternate universes, and that’s something I’d give anything to see with my own eyes.
If I was lucky enough to be so accurate to fall past an event horizon, I’d love it. But I’d also worry my perception of time would change such that my death would feel infinite. I would be equally excited and terrified
Time is relarive to your frame of reference. You are always the source of your own frame of reference, so you can never feel the effect of time dilation on yourself. At worst, it would look like the universe outside the horizon started to accelerate to unimaginable speeds. But you would never feel trapped in an unending, at worst that is simply what it would look like to us.
If time is relative wouldn’t your death be infinite already?
I might have eaten too many mushrooms in my “time” but isn’t everything happening everywhere all at once? I mean I always figured we experienced time simply because of gravitational forces upon us. But I also took a lot of psychedelics and have no actual education in the matter lol. Please, anyone, feel free to enlighten me. I’m very open minded.
Wish I had answers, but converse to your handle, people expressing this kind of vulnerable, raw curiosity so that we all might learn something, is exactly why I love the Internet. :D
Unfortunately the horrible death would come long before you even reach the event horizon. The tidal forces would tear you apart and eventually, tear apart the molecules that used to make up you. Every depiction of crossing a black hole event horizon just pretends that doesn’t happen for the sake of demonstration.
That’s not entirely true for a sufficiently large black hole. It’s possible to cross the event horizon before tidal forces are strong enough to cause problems. You’ll definitely be ripped apart eventually, but you’d at least be able to see the inside before you become atomic spaghet.
What if you enter the black hole at light speed?
It is impossible for anything with mass to travel at light speed. Even if it were possible, entities traveling at light speed (1) do not experience time, at least not in the way that a sub-lightspeed entity does, and (2) are effectively unable to communicate with sub-lightspeed entities. In fact, the only thing they can “communicate” with is the thing they’re going to collide with due to relativistic beaming.
So given the above: if you imagine that you were traveling at light speed toward a black hole, you’d have to think of it as experiencing your whole existence simultaneously. Your creation, crossing the event horizon, being stretched by tidal forces, and collision/absorption into whatever exists inside the sphere… all happens at once.
Black hole nested multiverse theory:
‘Inside’ of many black holes… there is a new ‘big bang’, and then another universe, which can form its own black holes, etc.
So… nope, not turtles all the way down, instead, singularities.
So then we are all inside a … progenitor universe’s black hole, and it is seemingly fundamentally impossible for anything above a subatomic scale to survive the transition… and thus it is also fundamentally impossible to know how long this has been going on or how this all started.
More commonly known as Black Hole Cosmology.
The horror for me is someone suggesting the universe is made of math. Are we dualists? Idealists? What do we believe in anymore!
I’m a big fan of them new fangled gravastars too.
Those things suck.
Big time.
Quick someone write a math horror book
Flatland?
I had a few in highschool that scared me big time!
But I had to give them back at the end of the year.
Black holes are indeed amazing, but they’ve also become a lazy plot device. I guess without them, something else would.
