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It's hard to say exactly why as I'm not a scientist, but I find the credibility of this piece extremely suspect. It seems to be making a number of sensational c

by nilkn 11y ago

It's hard to say exactly why as I'm not a scientist, but I find the credibility of this piece extremely suspect. It seems to be making a number of sensational claims (splitting of reality?) and I don't get the feeling that the author understands this material on anything other than a completely amateur level. Also, this seems to commit the famous mistake of thinking that you will be ripped to shreds by tidal forces the second you cross the event horizon. This is well-known to be false. For sufficiently large black holes you can peacefully pass beyond the horizon (unless there's something else going on, like a firewall).

yellowapple 11y ago
> For sufficiently large black holes you can peacefully pass beyond the horizon (unless there's something else going on, like a firewall). The article addresses this by pointing out that the "tidal forces" in question are only noticeable for smaller black holes (at which point "spaghettification" - which is, by the way, the formal technical term for this phenomenon - occurs); for larger ones, spaghettification forces are too small to even be felt. The Wikipedia article on spaghettification [0] has more details. The mechanics are similar to those of a body's Roche limit (the point where the tidal forces of one body will disintegrate a satellite body held together only by its own gravity; i.e. the reason why the gas giants tend to have rings). Granted, my own understanding of astrophysics isn't a whole lot better than an amateur level, either, but the article doesn't seem all that inconsistent with how people who do have expertise in astrophysics have described these sorts of things. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
- nilkn 11y ago
  You're right, I glossed over that the article does address that point. So I retract that criticism. I'm honestly at this point just exceedingly skeptical of mostly everything I read about theoretical physics unless it's coming directly from an expert.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    To be fair, I'm pretty skeptical of stuff about black holes even when they do come from experts, since there's so much contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics in this particular context, and experts more well-versed in one field over the other will try to use that field's explanations over the other's. Black holes are fuckin' weird.

by nilkn 11y ago

yellowapple 11y ago

> For sufficiently large black holes you can peacefully pass beyond the horizon (unless there's something else going on, like a firewall). The article addresses this by pointing out that the "tidal forces" in question are only noticeable for smaller black holes (at which point "spaghettification" - which is, by the way, the formal technical term for this phenomenon - occurs); for larger ones, spaghettification forces are too small to even be felt. The Wikipedia article on spaghettification [0] has more details. The mechanics are similar to those of a body's Roche limit (the point where the tidal forces of one body will disintegrate a satellite body held together only by its own gravity; i.e. the reason why the gas giants tend to have rings). Granted, my own understanding of astrophysics isn't a whole lot better than an amateur level, either, but the article doesn't seem all that inconsistent with how people who do have expertise in astrophysics have described these sorts of things. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

nilkn 11y ago
You're right, I glossed over that the article does address that point. So I retract that criticism. I'm honestly at this point just exceedingly skeptical of mostly everything I read about theoretical physics unless it's coming directly from an expert.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  To be fair, I'm pretty skeptical of stuff about black holes even when they do come from experts, since there's so much contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics in this particular context, and experts more well-versed in one field over the other will try to use that field's explanations over the other's. Black holes are fuckin' weird.