Thread: what is a black hole

Originally Posted by mugaliens

I believe that as research in particle physics continues to progress, the math and science in that field will develop to the point where we can know with near absolute certainty what's going on inside a black hole.

Um-m-m-m, no. Science does not work that way. No matter how logical a hypothesis may appear to be, it must be experimentally verified. Obviously, we cannot bring a black hole into the lab. The problem is that we cannot send instruments into black holes. The attempt would destroy the instruments. Even if we could get an instrument package into a black hole, then we could not get the data out.

I can see your argument 'Mr me.', but do not agree.

I can envisage a time where a Black Hole is constructed in some sort of Plasma ball encasement

for a few seconds we might be able to actually work with this thing... Its not on the agenda of CERN yet but that day could come..

It can not be said we can never.. because we might. Being told it can not ever be done is not good science is it ?

Originally Posted by astromark

I can see your argument 'Mr me.', but do not agree.

I can envisage a time where a Black Hole is constructed in some sort of Plasma ball encasement

for a few seconds we might be able to actually work with this thing... Its not on the agenda of CERN yet but that day could come..

It can not be said we can never.. because we might. Being told it can not ever be done is not good science is it ?

So, I gather that you envision constructing the black hole around the instrumentation. That is, however, a non-trivial task. The Schwarzschild radius of the Earth is 9 mm. The Sun's Schwarzschild radius is 3 km. Once inside the Schwarzschild radius, anything there will be crushed to the singularity. Pretending for a microsecond that the instrument(s) could gather data before being crushed, it still doesn't get you around another serious problem for black holes. The escape velocity of a black hole is greater than the speed of light. The speed of a signal moving through wire or optical fiber is substantially slower than light in a vacuum.

Originally Posted by astromark

As the true scientist is always willing to throw out the baby with the bath water..

As facts are found so too does the view change. That is if understood the truly only scientific way forward.. >>>> and forward we go.

That's the way I understand things, except for the part about throwing out the baby.

To me, the baby represents what's true, right, and just i.e. what we want to keep, vs the bathwater which is junk and should be flushed. My take on things is that people often confuse what's bathwater with what's baby.

Originally Posted by astromark

I can envisage a time where a Black Hole is constructed in some sort of Plasma ball encasement for a few seconds we might be able to actually work with this thing...

If Hawking was right about his radiation, a 500,000 lb black hole would vaporize in approximately 1 second with a force equivalent to 5×10^6 megatons of TNT. That's not 5 MT of TNT, equivalent to about 15 average-sized nuclear weapons. That's 5 Million megatons of TNT, equivalent to 15 million nuclear weapons. To classify this as an extinction-level event would be quite accurate.

To avoid this calamity, you'll need a far smaller black hole, who whose radiation won't turn your lab into gamma-irradiated plasma. At such small scales, say around a few TeV, you're looking at lifetimes on the order of 10E−26 s. You'd be able to capture it's demise on a wide range of particle detectors, but there will be no time for interactive experimentation.