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Politics : Should God be replaced?
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To: cosmicforce who wrote (5356)12/22/2000 4:21:10 PM
From: Druss  Read Replies (1) of 28931
 
Cosmic Force--<<My kids were asking about black holes and what it is like "inside one". Try answering that one for a 7 and 9 year old!>>
I will give it a try. In smaller black holes the general theory is that matter is simply compressed beyond recognition. So it is broken down to elemental particles. Some physicists don't like this idea because it eliminates all that went before. An analogy would be burning a newspaper. In practical terms it is not really possible but in theoretical terms you could if you captured everything burnt reconstruct the newspaper. A black hole would seem to destroy that as a possibility.
Larger black holes however can be very interesting. I mean very very large black holes. If you double the mass of the black hole you double the radius. This means the available volume goes up 8x. A black hole containing the matter of a galaxy would be more than 50x the diameter of the orbit of Pluto and the internal volume would be no more dense than a gas. Suppose you take a black hole the size of the known universe. The volume has increased so much that the matter inside would be equivalent to that of an exceedingly thin gas. According to physicist Kip Thorne we may be in a black hole.
So tell your kids to look around. That may be what a really big black hole looks like.
All the Best
Druss
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