Science

[trolls' bane]

Originally Posted by katya

"quantum froth" huh. Never heard of that. But I do have a hard time trying to get my head around the concept of infinite mass. Wait, suddenly I forgot what an event horizon is. Wasn`t it something to do with the trapped light? How about the thing about the two slit experiement and electrons being in two places at once- is that related to quantum physics? I remember reading an article about it, how small things can be in two places at once (even as big as a small dust particle???). I haven`t thought about this stuff for a long time. Really crazy though. Hard to imagine. Extra dimensions are hard to imagine.

I've heard of that dual electron theory, or whatever you call it. Wow, you apparently know more than I.
But black holes are not of infinite mass. That is impossible. In fact, just to contradict myself, I'll say something that my senior docent/co-worker at the Living Desert said. He's smart, and pointed out what I'd never thought of: that there is no such thing as infinite in a finite universe. Infinite mass would destroy the universe. And one has to wonder: If the Universe was a singularity once, how come black holes don't "explode" (or expand) and create a new universe? Because the Big Bang (ah, I love science for it's simple names that are so blatantly simple that simplicity itself looks complex!) was a different kind of singularity: it was a timelike singularity. There was no such thing as time before the Big Bang. There was nothing. In fact, there was so much of nothing, that words like place are rendered useless, and even words like nothing and useless can't exist, and existence itself is impossible. Even impossiblility is unheard of, and then again, you can't hear anything if there is nothing to hear and nothing to carry the waves and now laws of science to govern how sound is received. On the other hand, black holes are spacelike singularities.
Which brings me to something else: space is not nothingness. Space is empty, but it's not nothingness. Nothingness cannot be empty, because it's nothing. In fact, it's theorized that space is just a word used ot describe the universal gravitational field.
And one more thing. Many people mistakenly thing that the galaxies are moving away from each other as the universe gets "bigger". WRONG! The galaxies, though getting farther and farther apart, are in fact remaining completely stationary except to the extent of minor tidal, gravitational, and coriolis forces combined with some laws of physics such as inertia (as in galactic collisoins). They appear to be moving apart because space is expanding. It's just getting bigger. I have some trouble explaining this, but perhaps the word, space dilation, is best to describe it.
And one more thing, in a black hole event horizon, for a ship passing into it, each day for them is millions or billions of years to a distant observer. And to them, the universe outside is moving at a chaotic rate. Chances are, the universe would collapse onto you long before you ever reached the horizon. All in a days work, too.