Re: opposite of relativistic time contraction

On 2008-03-14, Ben Crowell <crowell07@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Suppose we have an intelligent species with control over godlike
> amounts of matter and energy.
[...]
> For instance, maybe this observer wants to be able to play chess, and
> have 10x more time to think about his moves than he otherwise
> would have. Is this possible?

It should be: I think the ergosphere of a suitably spinning Kerr black
hole might have the required property (but too lazy to check).
Certainly something just short of a Tipler cylinder should suffice.


> It's easy to apply a large acceleration for a short time: just move
> a microscopic black hole close to him, and you can easily obtain
> accelerations of, say, 1000 m/s2 with negligible tidal effects,
> without getting him anywhere near its microscopic event horizon.

That's exactly reversed: microscopic black holes have greater tidal
stresses for a given acceleration than larger ones.

Getting a very high gravitational acceleration with negligible tides
could probably be done by carefully arranging the matter/energy nearby
to shape the field so that it is very close to flat around the
astronaut, though highly curved (and deadly) not too far away.
Something like a spacetime analog of the eye of a hurricane.  I don't
think we need to worry too much about how the constructed
matter/energy arrangement is itself accelerated, since that probably
isn't too difficult for beings that can construct black holes at will.


- Tim