Wednesday 1 September 2021

Making Sense Of Black Holes

A black hole is not a hole. It is a region of relatively contracted space intervals and relatively expanded time intervals due to the presence of mass.

The periphery of a black hole, the event horizon, is the circumference at the radial distance from its centre where the quantity of mass of the black hole is sufficient to contract the intervals of space to the degree that the geodesic of light is curved within that circumference, so that light cannot "escape" the black hole.

The centre of a black hole, the singularity, is an idealised mathematical point where the quantity of mass of the black hole is sufficient to contract the intervals of space to zero, and expand the intervals of time to infinity. (More realistically, at the centre, the intervals of space are contracted to the minimum distance, the Planck length, and the intervals of time are expanded to the distance that is inversely proportional to the space contraction.)

From the perspective of regions outside a black hole — the only locations where observers construe experience as meaning — matter falling into a black hole can never reach the singularity, because the increasing expansion of time intervals on this trajectory entails that the process would take an infinite amount of time to unfold.