Surely you believe that if you fall into a black hole, then you will be instant death. But in reality as suggested by physics, your fate will be much more strange. In the future it can happen to anyone. Maybe you are trying to find a new habitable planet for the human race or just fell asleep during the long journey. What happens if you fall into a black hole? You would expect that you will grind or break. But it is not so.
At the moment when you enter a black hole, reality is divided into two parts. In one you will be immediately destroyed, and another dive into the black hole totally unharmed.
A black hole is a place where known laws of physics do not work. Einstein taught us that gravity bends space itself, and deforms it. So if you take a sufficiently dense object, space-time can become so curved that wrapped itself in itself, after making a hole in the fabric of reality.
A massive star that ran out of fuel, can provide extreme density necessary to create this deformed phase space. Caving in under its own weight and collapser, a massive object with an addictive and space-time. The gravitational field is so powerful that it can not leave even light than the doomed region, in which there is this star, to a gloomy fate: the black hole.
The outer boundary of a black hole is its event horizon, the point at which the force of gravity counteracts the attempts of the light to leave her. Come too close and will not be returning.
The event horizon of burning energy. Quantum effects at this boundary create streams of hot particles flowing back into the Universe. This so-called Hawking radiation, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who predicted its existence. After enough time a black hole will evaporate their mass and disappear completely.
Plunging into a black hole, you will find that space is more curved, while in the center will not be curved infinitely. It’s a singularity. Space and time cease to have any meaning, and the laws of physics known to us who need space and time are no longer working.
What happens at the singularity? No one knows. Another universe? Oblivion? Matthew McConaughey is floating on the other side of the bookshelves? Mystery.
What happens if you accidentally fall into one of these cosmic aberration? First ask your cosmic companion — let’s call her Anna — which looks like you are floating toward the black hole, while it remains at a safe distance. She watches strange things.
If you are accelerated towards the event horizon, Anna sees how you stretched and distorted, as if she looks at you through a giant magnifying glass. In addition, the closer you get to the horizon, the more your movements are slowed.
You can’t shout, because air in space there, but I can try to signal a message to Anna Morse the light of his iPhone (there’s even app for this). However, your words will reach her slower and slower, because the light waves are stretched to lower and more red frequencies, “Well, h o p o W o, h o R about…”.
When you reach the horizon, Anna will see that you were frozen like someone pressed the pause button. You will be stuck there, immobilized and stretched across the surface of the horizon, when the increasing heat will start to absorb you.
According to Anna, you slowly erases the tension of space, time stop and warmth of Hawking radiation. Before taking the plunge into the darkness of a black hole, you will turn into ashes.
But before you start planning the funeral, let’s forget about Anna and view this horrible scene from your point of view. And you know what’s going on here? Nothing.
You sail straight into the most evil manifestation of nature and not get any bumps or bruises — and certainly not stretched, not slowing down and not fry in the radiation. Because are in free fall and does not feel gravitation: Einstein called it “the happiest thought”.
In the end, the event horizon is not a brick wall, floating in space. It is an artifact of perspective. The observer who remains outside a black hole, can not see through it, but it’s not your problem. For you horizon does not exist.
If the black hole was smaller, you would have a problem. The force of gravity would be much stronger at your feet than at your head, and you would be stretched like spaghetti. But luckily for you it’s a big black hole, millions of times more massive than the Sun, so the forces that could have you spagettification, weak enough to be ignored.
Moreover, a sufficiently large black hole you could live the rest of his life, and after to die at the singularity.
How normal this life will be the big question, given that you sucked against your will into the gap in the space-time continuum and there is no turning back.
But if you think about it, we all know the feeling, the experience of communicating not with space but with time. Time goes only forward, never back, and draws us against our will, leaving no chance for retreat.
It’s not just an analogy. Black holes distort space and time to such an extreme state that inside the event horizon of a black hole space and time actually switch roles. In fact, time is what sucks you into a singularity. You can’t turn around and walk away from the black hole is exactly the same as can’t turn around and go back to the past.
At this point you ask yourself: what’s wrong with Anna? If you repose inside a black hole, being surrounded by empty space, why your partner sees how you burn up in the radiation at the event horizon? Hallucinations?
In fact, Anna is in perfect health. From her point of view, you really burned on the horizon. It’s not an illusion. She could even gather your ashes and send him home.
In fact, the laws of nature require that you remain outside the black hole, as seen from the perspective of Anna. This is because quantum physics requires that information is not lost, not lost. Every bit of information that tells of your existence, must remain beyond the horizon, to the laws of physics Anna is not violated.
On the other hand, the laws of physics also require that you sailed across the horizon without colliding with hot particles or something out of the ordinary. Otherwise, you will violate “the happiest thought” of Einstein and his General theory of relativity.
So, the laws of physics demand that you were at the same time outside the black hole in the form of a handful of the ash and inside the black hole, alive and well. And there is also a third law of physics which says that information cannot be cloned. You have to be in two places, but there can only be one copy of you.
Anyway, the laws of physics lead us to the conclusion, which seems rather pointless. Physicists call this puzzle the information paradox of a black hole. Fortunately, in the 1990s, they found a way to solve it.
Leonard Susskind came to the conclusion that there is no paradox, because no one sees your copy. Anna sees only one copy of you. You see only one copy. You and Anna will never be able to match (and its observations too). And there is no third observer can simultaneously observe a black hole from the inside and outside. So no laws of physics are not violated.
But you probably would like to know whose story is true. You dead or alive? If black holes us something and taught, the answer to that question is simply no. Reality depends on who you ask. There is the reality of Anna and your reality. That’s all.
In any case, so thought for a long time. Summer 2012 physics Ahmed, Almari, Donald Marolf, Joe Polchinski and James Sully, known collectively as AMPS, conceived a thought experiment that threatens to turn everything we had collected about black holes.
They suggested that the decision of Susskind based on the fact that any discrepancy between you and Anna-mediated event horizon. Doesn’t matter saw Anna bad version of you, torn Hawking radiation, because the horizon does not allow her to see a different version of you, floating in a black hole.
But what if she had a way of knowing what was on the other side of the horizon without crossing it?
Normal relativity will say “no-no”, but quantum mechanics blurs the rules a bit. Anna could see the horizon using a little trick, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.
This occurs when two sets of particles are separated in space, mysteriously obfuscated. They are part of one invisible whole, therefore, the information that describes them, in a mysterious way binds between them.
The idea of AMPS based on this phenomenon. For example, Anna scoops a bit of information on the horizon — let’s call her A.
If her story is true, and you’ve already gone to a better world, And then, scoop up the Hawking radiation outside the black hole must be entangled with another particle B of information, which is also part of the hot clouds of radiation.
On the other hand, if your story is true and you are alive and well on the other side of the event horizon, then A must be confused with another piece of information C, which is somewhere inside the black hole. But here’s the point: every bit of information you can get lost only once. From this it follows that And can be confused with either B or C, but not simultaneously with both.
So, Anna takes a particle A and puts it in the car manual decoding of confusion, which gives her the answer: a, B, or C.
If the answer is C, your story wins, but the laws of quantum mechanics are violated. If A is entangled with C, which is deep inside in a black hole, then this piece of information lost to Anna forever. This violates the quantum law of the impossibility of losing information.
B. decoding remains If Anne discovers that A confused with B, Anna wins and the General theory of relativity loses. If A confused with B, the story of Anna is the only true history, which means that you actually burned to the ground. Instead of having to sail right through the horizon, as suggests relativity, you’ll be faced with a blazing wall of fire.
Thus, we return to where we started: what happens when you fall into a black hole? You glide through it and live a normal life, thanks to the reality that strangely depends on the observer? Or you come to the horizon of a black hole only to be faced with a deadly wall of fire?
No one knows the answer, and therefore, this issue has become one of the most controversial in the field of fundamental physics.
More than a hundred years, physicists have been trying to reconcile General relativity with quantum mechanics, believing that one of them will have ultimately to concede. The solution to the above paradox walls of fire must refer to the winner and to lead us to even deeper theory of the Universe.
One of the clues may lie in car, decoding Anne. To find out which other bits of information entangled with A, is extremely challenging. Therefore, physics Daniel Harlow of Princeton University in new Jersey, and Patrick Hayden, working at Stanford University in California, decided to find out how much time is required for decoding.
In 2013, they estimate that even with the fastest computer in existence, Anne need an awful lot of time to unscramble the confusion. By the time she finds the answer, the black hole already for a long time will evaporate, disappear from the Universe and will take with them the mystery of the deadly walls of fire.
If this is so, one only the complexity of the problem can interfere with Anna to find out whose story is true. Both stories will remain equally true, the laws of physics intact, reality independent of the observer, and no one would be in danger of being absorbed by the wall of fire.
It also gives physicists a new food for thought: Gryaznaya connection between complex calculations (such as those who cannot hold Anna) and space-time. Perhaps somewhere there’s far more behind.
These are black holes. Not only are they annoying obstacles for space travelers. They are also theoretical laboratories, which brought the laws of physics to a white heat, and the subtle nuances of our Universe derive such a level that to ignore them anymore.
If the true nature of reality somewhere, the best place to search for it, is a black hole. However, to look better from the inside. Send Anna, her turn now.
What happens if you fall into a black hole?
Ilya Hel