What happens if a person were to go through a black hole? Does anyone know?

muchafraid

[This message has been edited by muchafraid (edited April 25, 2000).]

They would die.

Kurgan

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http://www.tcgames.com/highlander/movie/images/4568-P-Kur-Front.gif)

If I might ask, how do they die?

muchafraid

If it was a normal black hole, they would be stretched out like a spagetti due to the difference in gravity present in a few meters. That would kill them, no matter what they were in.

If it was a super-massive black hole, the stretch effect wouldn't happen (I don't remember why, but I saw it on discovery http://www.jediknight.net/mboard/smile.gif). When you hit the black hole your mass would be crunched into oblivion (basically). The crunch is so great that when everything hits the singularity space and time are both crunched and the result is something called 'quantum foam'.

Have you ever seen one of those rubbery representations of gravity? They represent it as a sheet and when a planet is put onto it the sheet bends around the planet and anything that gets close rolls in towards it. When a black hole is represented, the sheet just drops, with a flat surface at the bottom. That is the singularity.

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"First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in."
-C.S. Lewis

The event horizon is like a point of no return, in which gravity overpowers even light. Nothing can escape a black hole once this point is passed. Conor is right in that you are stretched into a long strand. The gravity is so overwhelming it is constantly tugging, and the closer you are to it the more powerful this tug is. Thus, the bottom of whatever is sucked in is getting sucked in faster than the top, and this process continues until you are a strand of particles. The larger the black hole this less of this affect you see, for the gravitational field of the black hole is more evenly dispersed over your body as a system.

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And there he is. The reigning champion of the Boonta Classic, and the crowd favorite-TheAhnFahn

I heard that, ya you would be stretched out like a spagetti due to the difference in gravity present in a few meters, but I thought that it would take an eternity to do that? Seeing as how you could take half of something, not to be gross but you could always split something in half.

muchafraid

muchafraid--

I heard that you would be stretched out like a spagetti due to the difference in gravity present in a few meters, but I thought that it would take an eternity to do that?

Time does dilate inside a gravity well. Time actually "flows" at a different rate on the surface of the earth than it does on the surface of the moon, because the gravity is greater on earth. A black hole would magnify the time dilation effect enormously.

But as I understand it, the tidal effects (the difference between the tug of gravity on one's head v. one's feet) would be great enough, even far outside the event horizon, to cause the spaghetti stretching effect. Time would dilate greatly, but not infinitely in close proximity to the black hole.

I can recommend some great SF about black holes that I think would also clarify some of the concepts:

>The short story "Kyrie" by Poul Anderson, which has been anthologized many times.

>The "Heechee" novels of Fredrik Pohl--GATEWAY, BEYOND THE BLUE EVENT HORIZON, HEECHEE RENDEZVOUS, THE ANNALS OF THE HEECHEE--which deal with ways to get around the tidal effects and actually survive the voyage into a black hole.

--wiz

Well, I went through a black hole and found myself in a hideous anti-universe were Bill Clinton is the president and you have to pay extra for cheese with your hot pretzel at the mall...

Anyone get a count of how many times they say 'mindful' in the new Star Wars movie? I'm just curious.

On a completely unrelated topic, can anyone step in with a good definition of entropy?

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"The entire universe is simply the fractal chaos boundary between intersecting domains of high and low energy."

In all of physics, there is perhaps no topic more underrated and misunderstood than entropy. The behavior of large collections of particles, such as the universe, a grain of sand, or a tuna salad sandwich, is dictated by two universal laws: one involving energy, the other involving entropy. And yet, while energy is described in great detail throughout any introductory physics textbook, entropy is relegated to about two or three pages, and is usually badly described.

Check out this page to maybe better understand entropy. http://tardis.svsu.edu/~slaven/Entropy.html)

muchafraid

Large black holes are made from collapsed stars whose mass becomes greater than their volume. Think of it like a 200 lbs. person standing on tiptoe on a thin surface; normally, his/her feet would be big enough to spread his/her weight, but on tiptoe the area in contact with the surface is too small, and all 200 pounds are concentrated in one spot.

In the case of black holes, they just keep getting stronger and stronger (gravimetrically, that is) as they pull in more mass.

Theoretically, it's possible to make artificial quantum singularities that would be basically smaller (and thus weaker) black holes.

Wrenching this thread back into Star Wars, it's the smaller artificial singularities (generated by dovin basals) that the Yuuzhan Vong use in NJO. http://www.jediknight.net/mboard/cool.gif)

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"The Beasts know much that we do not." -Ancient Jedi proverb