Black Holes

[Lycanorukke]

That's very curious. Can you point me to a reference on the subject?

It comes back to time dilation.

For an external observer, it takes an infinite amount of time to observe something fall into the black hole, due to time dilating near the event horizon. So an external observer would have to wait an infinite amount of time into the future to see something actually fall inside the event horizon.

For a white hole (essentially being a reversed black hole), it would take an infinite amount of time for something to fall _out_ of the hole. Since the external observer is seeing the white hole (EM radiation, etc), what they are seeing must have been travelling for an infinite amount of time to get out of the hole, so the White hole must have existed an infinite amount of time into the past of the observer.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Postulation; well, the video describes white holes as a mathematical oddity that has no real physical example, other than the massive Gamma Ray Burst that appeared to have no real cause, and yet the same burst had all the earmarks of what a white hole would look like if it were to actually manifest itself.

To me a true white hole would have to be a singularity that went "hay-wire" for lack of a better term. From a gaming and fictional standpoint, it would could be explained as a kind of "adjustment" or shift at the quantum level that vectors the energy of the quantum particles into a direction other then the gravity vector. It would result in a massive gamma ray burst. The kind of thing that would destroy the players and their ship...of course, if they're that near a black hole ...

To me a white hole seems like it would be dependent on something about quantum mechanics that we don't already know about that could result in a Gamma Ray Burst event. The tech levels may or may not lend themselves to the players being able to explore singularities ... interesting.

 

[simonh]

That's very curious. Can you point me to a reference on the subject?

Wikipedia has a decent article on White Holes.

"For an observer outside using Schwarzschild coordinates, infalling particles take an infinite time to reach the black hole horizon infinitely far in the future, while outgoing particles which pass the observer have been traveling outward for an infinite time since crossing the white hole horizon infinitely far in the past..."

Mathematically they're the time reverse of a black hole. Particles emerging from the white hole event horizon would take infinite time to reach a distant observer, so a white hole can only exist if it has done so for infinite time, which requires that it exist in an infinitely old universe. That's what's meant by a maximally extended schwarzchild metric - it's the mathematical description of a spacetime infinitely extended into all the dimensions of space and time.

The article does include some speculation in the last section that the Big Bang may have been a white hole, generated by the collapse of a black hole in a parent universe. That's a new opne on me, but I'm not going to say it's impossible. I've an open mind about it, but if it's true I don't see how it would allow for the creation of discrete white holes in our universe. There's still no physical model presented for how such a thing could occur, and even if one did occur it would still be unbelievably, almost infinitely unstable.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Blue Ghost]

I haven't read the article yet, but my knee jerk reaction is that a white hole almost sounds like it would have to be something imported from "outside" our universe for it to do what it's said to be able to do.

Something really wild; a collision between a black hole and an antimatter black hole might cause a similar gamma ray burst as the two annihilated one another, although that wouldn't necessarily yield a white hole.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Okay, I read it. So the universe is the result of a white hole, which is the result of two membranes colliding, the impact of which gave rise to the white hole, which resulted in the big bang, which yielded everything we see around us. Interesting.

To be honest, I don't buy into the time reversal argument simply because T is said to be symmetrical. I think there's one vector for everything; forward, and that you can split forward into various components relative to one another, but you can't stick a negative sign in front of forward to make it symmetrical relative to itself.

Therefore a white hole needs to be some external phenomenon like the article intimates with the big bang concept.

For a gaming framework ... a white hole violates law 2 or thermodynamics if we say its a construct or result of what's here in our universe. If it's something imported from outside our universe, then it's essentially a warp funneling energy into our universe. The whole white hole thing about it being a region within a black hole's even horizon, to me, seems speculative and esoteric at best. What this means for players, is that there may be a chance of getting very scarily close to a black hole, but a while hole would just atomized them instantly...like a Federation CA type-1 phaser set to disintegrate.

The whole thing about two black holes being connected by a warp; ... I think there's a real misconception about what gravity is, and what the "fabric" of so-called "space-time" is. And I think current researchers have got it wrong.

Beyond that, it's time to commit thoughts to paper, and see if people think it's fun or not.

 

[aramis]

White holes can be really small and weak... and everywhere. Then they're called zero point energy and/or quantum particle pair generators.

White holes might be literally everywhere, generating the expansion of spacetime that's recently been measured.

 

[Lycanorukke]

I haven't read the article yet, but my knee jerk reaction is that a white hole almost sounds like it would have to be something imported from "outside" our universe for it to do what it's said to be able to do.

Stargate SG-1 played with that with ZPM's (zero point modules), a form of ultra-tech battery.

The ZPM was essentially a small artificial universe connected to this universe by a power control module ( a universe in a bottle ). The base energy of the artificial universe was higher than this universe, so you had a massive energy flow and hence a strong power source you could use. As the artifical universe 'ran down' and equalized with this universe the power stopped.

The downside was though is the power module failed catastrophicly, all the energy would be released at once, and produce a large 'bang'. As in "Wasn't there a planet here a moment ago?" size 'bang'. But if you needed a few terrawatts of power for a thousand years, it was the go to device.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Interesting. More stuff to consider.