Does light accelerate when entering a black hole, thereby exceeding the speed of light? ;)
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Does light accelerate when entering a black hole, thereby exceeding the speed of light? ;)
So what are your thoughts on 'dark energy'? Or do you need to change your overalls to consider the matter? :D
According to Einstein, who wasn’t always right, but was right about most things, the speed of light is a constant, no matter your position it always seems to be moving at the same speed. A lot of strange things go on in and around a black hole, but nothing needs to be exotic for it to work.
Recall Einstein’s experiment where he predicted the bending of light coming from stars that would be passing behind the sun during an eclipse, he predicted the gravity of the sun would bend the beam of light from these stars, and he was dead on. So increase the gravity until the beam of light is deflected 180 degrees, and it keeps falling back into the object. Does it speed up? It doesn’t have to for this to work. The speed limit of the universe isn’t a property of light itself, it’s just that point where time and space reach a zero, as I was saying, at the speed of light time stops, so there is no time for it to go faster, unless time went backward. And if time went backward, then it wouldn’t fall into the hole!
Russell
A good question Berry, honestly I haven’t given it a great deal of thought. Scientist think it is what is driving the expansion of the universe. The actual fabric of the universe is stretching, and it’s not slowing down. This is certainly happening, if they want to call it dark energy, as good a name as any I guess? Once again the word dark means they have no idea what it is.
An analogy I think of often is, “Does a fish know he’s wet?”. We’ve always thought of space as nothing, an empty vacuum. But it is the ocean we are floating in, whether it’s an ocean of sub atomic partials that have not assembled into atoms? Or just energy, a mass of gravitational forces, magnetic fields, exactly what it is remains a mystery. But the facts speak to the idea that is it something. Are we like fish deep in the ocean? Unaware that we are wet? Proof in the recent experiments where they measured the gravitational waves from two colliding black holes, from a billion light years away. If the waves got from there to here, they must have been rippling in something? Or so it would seem to me.
Russell
The concept of 'empty space' is meaningless. You can't measure distance without using something to measure it with. That something is light, and if there is light the empty space is no longer empty. Furthermore, conjugate pairs of particles can come into existence and disappear again provided their fleeting existence is short enough. Also space (or rather space time) is granular on a small scale (10-35m and 3.10-45s), so space is not the simple empty nothingness that it might appear.
I tested this theory in my garden shed this morning.
The results were inconclusive.
I think I may need a bigger shed.
I used a cardboard box. Not sure what happened, but I can hear all the neighbours screaming!