3 ms·
Fun! I think there's an interesting hidden puzzle in the first sentence: > 101 starship captains, bored with life in the Federation, decide to arrange their st
by itishappy 2y ago
Fun! I think there's an interesting hidden puzzle in the first sentence:
> 101 starship captains, bored with life in the Federation, decide to arrange their starships in a line, equally spaced, and let them fall straight into an enormous spherically symmetrical black hole—one right after the other.
Does this problem have a globally consistent solution? In the curved spacetime around the blackhole, can everyone agree on what equal spacing means?
- codethief 2y agoNo, they can't. One could very well come up with some other coordinate system whose time & space coordinates are (non-linear) combinations of the usual Schwarzschild time & space coordinates. In that coordinate system, spatial slices of equal time would be different, so spatial distances would be measured differently. TL;DR Just pretend the author wrote "[…] equally spaced with respect to some observer's frame of reference" (e.g. a stationary observer at infinity that uses the usual Schwarzschild coordinates).