Black Holes?

Black Holes?

The premise for the existence of black holes is that when the mass of a star is large enough, the gravity of the star will be so intense that the 'escape velocity' would exceed the speed of light. That means that light could never leave a black hole (hence its name) and nothing else could either (as nothing can exceed the speed of light). There is also an 'event horizon' which is the theoretical sphere around the star where the gravitational pull just gets to that level which would require an escape veloicty of the speed of light. The theory is that once an object reaches the 'event horizon' time stops and it remains there for all time (until the end of the universe).

The first problem I have with that is that the escape velocity is defined to be the speed which is required to for an object to reach the edge of the universe without gravity pulling it back. Time has to stop at the event horizon as no one can can see any changes (light could not get out), but that is not true as light could always make it some distance (if the gravity was finite). So, you could have a series of satellites orbiting just outside the event horizon each relaying signals to the next satellite until the information reaches the edge of the universe. However, that is just one of the absurdities of a black hole. Below is a rough diagram to explain a series of conundrums raised by the absurdity of black holes.

From classical physics it is well known that if you are inside a homogenous sphere, it has no observable gravitational pull (it pulls in all directions equally so that there is no discernable gravity), but once you are outside the sphere it appears as if the sphere is a point mass at its center. As soon as the stars pass Fred and Olivia, Fred starts falling toward Charles and Olivia starts orbiting in a circular orbit (that is how quickly she was traveling before).

Knowing of the dangerous threat to Charles and Fred, Eric (the most excellent experimental physicist) came to their rescue and built a protective sphere around Charles with a protective tube going through the sphere for Fred to travel through. Eric used an odd form of neutronium which can withstand infinite compression and even vast temperatures as long as the pressure is correspondingly high. The interior of the area for Charles and Fred is kept a perfect vacuum so that Fred can fall freely. Whew!

The first absurdity of black holes is that the action of a mass falling into a black hole is not invertible. In physics, for all other interactions there is time symmetry which means that the action can go either way in time. If hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water, then water can break down to hydrogen and oxygen. There is no way to determine if any action in physics is going forward or backward in time, except, of course, the absurdity of anything falling into a black hole. Further as the mass of the new star increases, one would expect the cycle of Fred falling to speed up, though when you add that extra atom of matter to cause an 'event horizon' it would just stop (which is absurd).

It should be noted that all four observers are under no observable acceleration so that the rules of special relativity need to be applied (i.e. they will always observe photons leaving and arriving at the same speed no matter what the relative speed of the observers). Of course gravity acceleration causes some problems for special relativity as Charles and Edgar can easily see that Olivia and Fred are being accelerated by gravity (Olivia and Fred see the rest of the universe being accelerated). As Charles and Edgar can not ever observe Fred going faster than the speed of light (photons would need to cross with some going faster than others) that means that Fred's mass must increase and his time (any watch he is carrying) must slow down so that he asymptotically approaches the speed of light but never reaches it no matter much mass Edgar threw into the new star.¹ Of course this also implies that Charles' time slows down and his mass increases as well (oddly enough) as he is accelerated toward all the incoming stars simultaneously (while he remained stationary as the actual accelerations canceled out). Olivia had no change in her mass once the stars passed as she was accelerating away from the new star as much as she was accelerating toward it (constant distance from the center of mass).

This would imply that inside any gravity well all masses would be greater and time would be slower. There would be no way to measure the increase in mass directly as the relative masses (and, implicitly, other forces) of everything would increase, it could only be inferred from the slowing of clocks (or speed of basic vibrations). When light is emitted in a gravity well, it has the high energy level of the increased masses. As it leaves the gravity well, it decreases in mass (red shifts), but this red shift is not observable as it will match the fundamental energy level of the interaction which produced it, e.g. photons emitted from hydrogen electrons shifting energy levels will always match local hydrogen photons though the energy level is higher in a gravity well as the mass of hydrogen is greater. Of course if you take two known masses and move them closer together, the combined mass should have a greater mass (measured gravitational pull) than separately, but for easily measurable masses this increase would not be measurable. For the new star created by Edgar, Olivia should observe a distinct increase in gravitational pull as the star forms (contrary to classical physics but predictable for special relativity observations). This also implies that Edgar (at the edge of the universe) sees all the clocks deep within any galaxy as much slower as the mass of the universe creates its own gravity well.

The fundamental flaw of the idea of black holes is the ommission of the decrease in mass which is required as anything leaves a gravity well. Light can leave any gravity well with no observable decrease in mass (red shifting) as the required higher energy level was already built into the masses of everything in the gravity well.

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This page was last updated on December 30, 2009