Black Holes and the shape of space..

May 31, 2008 by MainFragger

OK, the universe is flat, and gravity wells are curves in space, orfrn space/time.

I keep thinking about how black holes swallow light, and I wonder if the fact that the gravity is that much stronger and swallows light is indicitave of an even deeper gravity well... Or perhaps an inverted gravity well.

What I am wondering is if a black hole doesn't so much "swallow" light, but distort our ability to see it. Lets take the flat and curved scenario one step further. Imagine you are standing on flat ground, and looking into a hole. But you are afraid to get too close to the hole for fear of falling in, so you step back a bit and look at it from an angle. Now from the angle you are looking at, you can't really see too deeply into the well, because its too dark.

I think that the light gets broken down by the black hole, and is eventually released as subatomic particles that are not affected by gravity that go back into space. We can't see the particles because they have practically no mass, and reflect no light. This might potentially explain to a certain degree dark energy.

I still believe in singularities as about as much as I believe in the tooth fairy. But I understand that until our understanding of black holes is better, there might be reasons why the results we get from readings from black holes might make it seem like there is a singularity. I don't think black holes actually permanently swallow information. I don't think it sends that information to a different dimension. I think it just disburses it in a way that we are not at this time able to observe.

And that in part is always why I wonder if it almost doesn't make sense to draw black holes on the flat and curved diagrams as a curve opposite to most other gravity wells. In other words, if Earth's gravity well is depicted as a flat surface with a 4,000 mile dip from the surface, perhaps a similarly sized black hole would be a 4,000 mile rise from the surface.

Polarity exists in many explanations of the universe, including direction, magnetism, and time.. So why not in gravity as well? We already know Gravity can exist partially as a partical, and as a field. So maybe in its own ways, it follows polarity rules in the same way that magnetism does. Perhaps we can think of contstructive or building type gravity as the negative gravity pole, and destructive, chaotic, or entropic gravity as positive gravity pole. Or would the direction of spin of the gravity well determine that?

I know I am guessing at most of this stuff. I'm not a scientist, and math makes my head hurt. But sometimes I hear scientists use analogies to explain basic theories to people. It seems to me, that sometimes, that analogy might actually provide some fundemental ways of thinking about what you are trying to experiment on/with. And yet, in the explanation of how they experiment, sometimes it seems like they abandon that analogy as nothing more than a tool for explanation and follow other less practical methods of thought.. Sometimes to the point of being intergalactic teleportation level leaps of logic.
My sense of logic might be missing things, because obviously, without understanding the math or sometimes the full process of how they came up with thier theory, I am not getting a full understanding lation of thier basic analogy. But that is why I am here. To get answers or find out answers from people who might have the patience to fill in some of those blanks, without being arrogant about it. In truth, I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of the laboratories or work rooms of scientists.

It might be silly, but I recently read a book about where science is going, and one of the things the author mentions is that the industry doesn't just need technical scientists, but seers..philosophers.. artists...poets.. I still don't fall into those, but I like thinking about these things, and perhaps on occasion making alternate suggestions to current thought paths. So maybe philosphy applies a little... Either way, Princeton isn't too far from me, neither is Rutgers, Drexel, U of P. So, if any of you are in the area, and want to hang out or chat.. I'd love to be involved in physics circles or science circles more directly than I currently am..even it is, a "dinner" stopover.