Re: A partial black hole?

On Feb 26, 4:33=A0pm, Erik Max Francis <m...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> He is correct that with a large enough black hole, the tidal forces
> could be made arbitrarily low, and the freefall time could be
> arbitrarily large, so that you could poke around and live your life and
> not really notice anything wrong -- because locally, things are still
> fine. =A0Your eventual destruction near the singularity would still be
> inevitable, though.

There's an excellent Greg Egan short story (from back in the days when
Greg Egan still wrote excellent short stories): "Into Darkness", in
which a character must move through a region where spacetime has been
"flattened" so that all movement must include a positive vector
towards the region's center.  IOW, once you step in you have to keep
moving inward.


> For any reasonably realistic black hole we can imagine today, though, it
> wouldn't work, as you say. =A0

Are you sure about that?  The largest observed black hole is (googles)
OJ287, which has an estimated 18 billion solar m*****.  BOTE
calculation suggests you could fall into that without being torn apart
by tides.  What your subjective freefall time would be, once inside, I
have no idea.



Doug M.