• Question: Why is there no time at the middle of a black hole?

    Asked by Yash The [A] Star to Pierre, Lisa, Kate, Jos, Joe on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 13 Nov 2014:


      This is too complicated for me. I did Physics at University but it still hurt my heard when you get to this part of it!

      Hare you read the “Uncle Albert” books by Russell Stannard. I htihnk they were written for 11-12 year olds, but our lecturer had them on our reading list at university too!

      Time and space and Uncle Albert
      Black Holes and Uncle Albert
      Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest

      Might be woth asking for them for Christmas? They’re really good fun and explain it all really well, and you can tell mum and dad that they are purely educcational too!

    • Photo: Pierre Lasorak

      Pierre Lasorak answered on 13 Nov 2014:


      Hi
      So it’s not exactly that there is not time in the middle of a black hole. In fact it is because we are not good enough in mathematics that we come to this conclusion. The idea is that if we apply the mathematics “carelessly” around a black hole then we find some weird things. Namely, the space becomes time and times becomes space. Now that doesn’t make much sense, so what cosmologists do in effect is what we call a “transformation of coordinates”. It’s a big word to say that we make some change in the way we define space and time so that we can still do physics inside the black hole.
      To be honest nobody really knows what is going down there.

    • Photo: Lisa Simmons

      Lisa Simmons answered on 18 Nov 2014:


      This is a cool question, but I don’t know enough about it to answer. I think the others have given you lot’s of good information

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