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Following last week’s apparent excitement over the topic of time, and having recently rewatched The Theory of Everything (a film about Stephen Hawking’s life) I thought I’d write a follow up article about black holes and time dilation.
Having lived in two countries wherein life appears trapped within the cement of time — Switzerland with its billion year old mountains and slightly younger traditional chalets, and Italy where you can walk amongst the ruins of the ancient Roman Empire — the idea that time moves slower in some places than it does in others is not all too outlandish.
Black holes are the most mysterious astrophysical phenomenon of the cosmos. Most believe they are like cosmic vacuums which sucks everything, including light, in. In reality black holes do not create a vacuum, but the opposite: through the density of its mass it attracts objects through its gravitational pull. In the center of a black hole is a point of singularity, a region unimaginatively dense. In recent years astrophysicists have been able to identify many such black holes through cosmic objects orbiting around some great invisible force, denoting both the black hole’s disguised nature and its unimaginable strength. Once the event horizon of a black hole is crossed, space and time stretch to seeming infinity.
Newton’s first law, the law of inertia, states that objects are always in motion until some contradicting force inhibits them. What would happen to a moving star when it is pulled in by a black hole? When the star crosses the event horizon the laws of movement through space and time change dramatically. The star can no longer escape; it can only move towards the black hole’s center (singularity). The model says that the star will continue moving in a plane where space and time exchange places and space is stretched into infinity.
What happens to time itself? As you get closer to a black hole the flow of time slows down. The closer you get, the more it slows, and from the vantage point of someone outside the hole, time stops all together. An object, for instance, falling into the black hole would appear frozen in time. It is interesting to note that this warping of time also happens on earth, but to a much lesser extent. Earth’s gravity is so weak that the slowing of time is unnoticeable, only highly sensitive instruments have detected that at sea level you age one-billionth of a second slower than you would on top of Mount Everest.
Though it is impossible to perform any sensible experiments at the center of a black hole, Einstein’s theory of gravity predicts that time is destroyed completely at its singularity. For this reason black holes are sometimes said to be the “reversers of creation”. Can the arrow of time be pointed back at us? Can life become a Lewis Carroll novel wherein each of us becomes the Red Queen who remembers the future instead of the past?
When it comes to our perceptions, the Red Queen represents human memory shockingly well. “To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness” (Dan Falk, In Search of Time). Though we may not be able to remember the future, like the Red Queen, we can picture the future just as well as we picture the past. We use similar regions in the brain’s frontal lobe when thinking about any direction of time, past or future. This individualistic nature of time makes it somewhat easier to envision what it would feel like on a temporal scale while in a black hole. We construct the experience of time in our heads. We are able to rearrange the facts and come up with a narrative more applicable to the person we claim to be. We manipulate time all the time, whether it is by trying to speed it up while at the gym, or slow it down as the years race past us.
When we truly come to understand the strangeness of time we can begin to grasp the nature of black holes and time dilation. In a black hole yesterday has not yet vanished into the past and the future hasn’t yet emerged from tomorrow. Each passing moment lingers longer than an eternity, and passes just as quickly. The points of singularity are the only places in our cosmos, as far as we can tell, where Father Time does not reign supreme. Instead he is barred from entering by a long gate that encircles the black hole’s event horizon.
“Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” (William James)
What a beautiful thought to be endlessly straddling the past and the future. 💫