No argument there - if you are in a black hole then all possible futures of your spaghettified stream of atoms will most certainly lie closer to the centre! :)Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 1st, 2021, 4:53 amYes, I can imagine that. It's kind of how you'd imagine things to happen if black holes continued to behave more or less as they were when they were just regular stars, but with a surface escape velocity greater than light speed. I guess we can kind of visualize it, in a hellish sort of way.Sy Borg wrote:Just as well, being an inveterate thought experimenter, I would have guessed that the central part of the black hole is completely "full" - at 100% possible intensity, with stuff constantly smashing into it at around the speed of light. Thus, any extra mass attracted by the BH would not settle in the centre (I cannot bring myself to say "singularity", which is an unrealistic concept) so any extra mass just increases the BH's radius.
But I think the environment inside the event horizon of a black hole predicted by General Relativity is so utterly alien that it's very difficult to imagine experiencing in any direct way (as opposed to "experiencing" it indirectly via the theory). As I understand it, the event horizon (defined in a particular class of black holes by the Schwarzschild radius) is the notional sphere on the surface of which the escape velocity is the speed of light. Presumably that wouldn't generally coincide with the physical surface of the object which became the black hole, if that object has continuned to contract below that surface. But I don't know whether, once that has happened, that underlying object must always contract to a singularity. (I see why you can't bring yourself to say "singularity". It seems, by its nature, to be an abstract, mathematical concept does't it.). I presume it depends what forces are left that are man enough to fight against gravity. In normal stars and planets that would be electrostatic repulsion (i.e. the EM force). But when gravity overcomes that there are more exotic repulsive forces, such as neutron degeneracy pressure (the force which keeps neutron stars "inflated").
Imagining being inside the event horizon, perhaps in orbit around the singularity, or whatever is in there, is extremely weird. As I said, as I understand it, according to the GR model, the curvature of spacetime is such that at any given distance from the centre of the BH, distances further away from that centre are not just further away in space; they're in the past. So all possible futures are closer to the centre. So, presumably, simply by existing you get closer to the centre. If it was somehow possible to be alive in that environment it's impossible to intuitively imagine what it would feel like.
While we can't say quite what it would be like to be capable of surviving in a black hole, I suspect it would be so overwhelmingly and disorientingly psychedelic that one would wish not to survive. Everything would be distorting wildly as if in a hall of mirrors, except it wouldn't just be visual, but physical.
Then again, we all live our lives at the bottom of a gravity well, with feet usually ageing slower than heads, that is, feet live very, very slightly in the past in relation to the head. Google says that, over the usual lifespan, the difference will be around 90 billionths of a second. That's about as much
Yes, I can't abide singularities. It would make more sense if a BH's centre turned out to be a quark-gluon or Planck point. Still, reality is weird and there's still much to be explained, so I probably should be more broad-minded about it.