Science Fiction Dictionary
A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z

 

Fall Into Black Hole Video

A video showing what happens if you fall into a black hole has been created by researchers Andrew Hamilton and Gavin Polhemus of the University of Colorado. If you fell into a black hole, what would it look like? Could you see beyond the event horizon? Take a look inside a black hole.


(Video shows inside of black hole)

Obviously, this is a CGI realization of the work done in predicting the characteristics of spacetime inside the event horizon of a Schwarzchild black hole. Sorry, nobody's sent in a camera! Here's an excerpt from the paper backing the simulation.

The view as the observer approaches the central singularity is of particular interest because, according to ideas arising from “observer complementarity,” points in opposite directions along the observer’s past light cone are at “the edge of locality,” where standard flat-space quantum-field-theory commutation rules may beat the brink of failure. Near the singularity, the observer’s view is aberrated by the diverging tidal force into a horizontal plane. The view in the horizontal plane is highly blue shifted, but all directions other than horizontal appear highly red shifted. We argue that the affine distance provides a canonical measure of distance along a light ray from emitter to observer. Since the affine distance is not directly measurable by the observer, we also consider perceptual distances, and argue that the trinocular distance (binocular distance is inadequate) provides an estimate of affine distance that would allow tree-leaping apes to survive in highly curved spacetime.

Considerately, the authors provide us with a nice sketch of the three-eyed inhabitants of a highly curved spacetime.


(Black Hole inhabitant with trinocular vision [pdf])

One must assume that acute inhabitants [shown above] of highly curved spacetime would evolve three eyes, trinocular vision, to process the ellipsoidal wavefront into a best distance, one that allows them to leap from tree to tree with the least incidence of death.

...the mean of the reciprocal polar and azimuthal binocular distances agrees well with the affine distance even well off-axis where the wavefront is quite non-spherical. This suggests that a good strategy for the brains of three-eyed apes would be to infer a distance from the mean of the reciprocal binocular distances, that is, from the trace of the wavefront curvature matrix.

Can you see outside a black hole?

“When an observer outside the horizon observes the horizon of a black hole,” the researchers say, “they are actually observing the outgoing horizon. When they subsequently fall through the horizon, they do not fall through the horizon they were looking at, the outgoing horizon; rather, they fall through the ingoing horizon, which was invisible to them until they actually passed through it. Once inside the horizon, the in-faller sees both outgoing and ingoing horizons.”

One good sf reference for this situation (falling into a black hole) comes from the Farscape series. John Crichton is an IASA astronaut working on an experimental project dubbed "Farscape". During a test flight above Earth's orbit, a wormhole suddenly appears, hurling John to a distant part of the universe.


(Falling into a wormhole)

What's your favorite falling into a black hole scenario?

I particularly enjoyed this video; for the past two Saturdays, I've been treated to Saturday Morning Physics lectures at the University of Michigan campus on the subject of black holes. Professor Doug Richstone, Lawrence H. Aller Professor of Astronomy, presented an excellent talk on Supermassive Black Holes and the Evolution of Galaxies. Professor Marta Volonteri contributed a fascinating talk on Black Holes Along Cosmic Time.

From MIT's Technology Review; see also the paper The edge of locality: visualizing a black hole from the inside [pdf]. Also, take a look at the resources at this University of Colorado site Journey into a Schwarzschild black hole for more details and extra videos. Thanks to Moira for the tip and reference.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/2/2009)

Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.

| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |

Would you like to contribute a story tip? It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add it here.

Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )

Related News Stories - (" Space Tech ")

Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space
'...the Hole is something like a vortex or a whirlpool?' - Frank K. Kelly, 1935.

Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'

Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...' - Murray Leinster, 1953.

SpaceX's Starman Tesla Roadster In Space
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.' - Theodore Sturgeon, 1941.

 

Google
  Web TechNovelgy.com   

Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.

 

 

 

 

Science Fiction Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's   1950's
1960's   1970's
1980's   1990's
2000's   2010's

Current News

Robotic Barber Programmed With a Number of Styles
'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'

Humanoid Boxing Robot KO's Opponent - It's A Knockout!
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'

Caterpillar Electric Mining Loader Not Yet Ready For Moon
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'

Centipede Robots Down On The Farm
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'

Anthropic's Claude AI Creates Legal Citation From Whole Cloth
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'

Students Vie For Lunar Regolith Mining Robot Prize
'About time you got here,' the astronaut said.

'They Erased My Memory' Says Ariana Grande
'...using a neutralizing electronic impulse.'

Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space
'...the Hole is something like a vortex or a whirlpool?'

Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'

DARPA Wants 'Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'

Robot Hand Creeps Along, Separate From It's Owner
'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'

Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'

Korean Exoskeleton Suit F1 Helps You Put It On
'Better late than never.'

Have AI Researchers Given Up On 'Bio-Babies'?
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'

Bunker Busters and Bore-Pellets
'The first revelation of the new Soviet bore-pellets.'

'Spikeless' Brand Swizzle Stick Detects Spiked Drinks
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'

More SF in the News Stories

More Beyond Technovelgy science news stories

Home | Glossary | Invention Timeline | Category | New | Contact Us | FAQ | Advertise |
Technovelgy.com - where science meets fiction™

Copyright© Technovelgy LLC; all rights reserved.