Thanks for your reply, nice and clearly described for my amateur physicist brain to follow! ;p I’ll reply in full when I’m less tired, but intrigued by your reply about time! In summary I think of it as a way of describing how something changes, rather than time actually existing. I.e. it’s relative to the energy the object has…so is a way of describing how much energy it has. I see you talk about black holes in a reply to someone else and my first thought is - the idea that time slows as your get closer (or is that a popular misconception?) relative to my thinking is that actually the particles are loosing energy, not time actually changing - and therefore would any particles actually catch up with each other as you describe? Let alone be observable to be moving.
And thinking about your last paragraph - are you not simply describing that object A which entered the black hole before object B, is simply is closer to the centre than B at any given ‘time’ which err doesn’t exist. And neither does space come to think of it. Space is the nothingness between something, so also just a way of describing how something changes or interacts with something else. E.g. 2 particles exert a force on each other and move closer together through an exchange of energy - space is simply part of a description of how much of the interaction has been completed, similar to time, hence why they’re thought of together and also as one and the same.
The distance thing is therefore how much force, what force and how strongly a force is being exerted rather than a physical thing.
Which (now a bit of side thought I had half an hour ago!) makes me think that black holes have no centre and the singularity is rather like the surface of a sphere, at which point all matter has no energy left to move - or perhaps its better to describe it that all matter’s energy is now potential energy due to the immense forces at work, a bit like a compressed spring.
Erm ok so I replied a lot in the end! I hope it makes some sense, I could probably ramble on some more but I’d better stop fir now! though I do realise there may be some concepts that I’m ignorant of that could destroy my thinking, so feel free to deconstruct!
So you do have a minor misconception there in that first paragraph, time dilation is relative. The slowdown of something falling into a black hole is seen from the perspective of a distant observer, the thing falling in experiences time normally but sees the outside universe running in fast-forward during the fall toward the horizon. Neither is losing energy, the extreme curvature of spacetime stretches out the light moving outward and compresses it in the other direction.
As to whether any particles can catch up to each other beneath the event horizon, our best theories suggest it is indeed possible. The steeply curved spacetime beneath the event horizon should still include valid paths where particles thrown in at an angle will intersect with each other as they spiral in. Velocity is relevant too, something that dives in at 99% the speed of light should be able to catch up to something that was dropped from a relative standstill just above the horizon if the time gap between them is small enough.
Also, space isn’t just “the gaps between things”, it’s dynamic, squashing and stretching in response to gravity and expanding due to dark energy. We have to account for these effects in order to keep the atomic clocks in our GPS satellites synced and the system functional.
Thanks for your reply, nice and clearly described for my amateur physicist brain to follow! ;p I’ll reply in full when I’m less tired, but intrigued by your reply about time! In summary I think of it as a way of describing how something changes, rather than time actually existing. I.e. it’s relative to the energy the object has…so is a way of describing how much energy it has. I see you talk about black holes in a reply to someone else and my first thought is - the idea that time slows as your get closer (or is that a popular misconception?) relative to my thinking is that actually the particles are loosing energy, not time actually changing - and therefore would any particles actually catch up with each other as you describe? Let alone be observable to be moving.
And thinking about your last paragraph - are you not simply describing that object A which entered the black hole before object B, is simply is closer to the centre than B at any given ‘time’ which err doesn’t exist. And neither does space come to think of it. Space is the nothingness between something, so also just a way of describing how something changes or interacts with something else. E.g. 2 particles exert a force on each other and move closer together through an exchange of energy - space is simply part of a description of how much of the interaction has been completed, similar to time, hence why they’re thought of together and also as one and the same.
The distance thing is therefore how much force, what force and how strongly a force is being exerted rather than a physical thing.
Which (now a bit of side thought I had half an hour ago!) makes me think that black holes have no centre and the singularity is rather like the surface of a sphere, at which point all matter has no energy left to move - or perhaps its better to describe it that all matter’s energy is now potential energy due to the immense forces at work, a bit like a compressed spring.
Erm ok so I replied a lot in the end! I hope it makes some sense, I could probably ramble on some more but I’d better stop fir now! though I do realise there may be some concepts that I’m ignorant of that could destroy my thinking, so feel free to deconstruct!
So you do have a minor misconception there in that first paragraph, time dilation is relative. The slowdown of something falling into a black hole is seen from the perspective of a distant observer, the thing falling in experiences time normally but sees the outside universe running in fast-forward during the fall toward the horizon. Neither is losing energy, the extreme curvature of spacetime stretches out the light moving outward and compresses it in the other direction.
As to whether any particles can catch up to each other beneath the event horizon, our best theories suggest it is indeed possible. The steeply curved spacetime beneath the event horizon should still include valid paths where particles thrown in at an angle will intersect with each other as they spiral in. Velocity is relevant too, something that dives in at 99% the speed of light should be able to catch up to something that was dropped from a relative standstill just above the horizon if the time gap between them is small enough.
Also, space isn’t just “the gaps between things”, it’s dynamic, squashing and stretching in response to gravity and expanding due to dark energy. We have to account for these effects in order to keep the atomic clocks in our GPS satellites synced and the system functional.