Re: opposite of relativistic time contraction

Ben Crowell wrote:

> That makes sense. Ideally, you'd build the gravitational equivalent
> of a flat capacitor plate, whose field is uniform. I think it helps,
> but maybe not as much as you'd think. The single number that's
> driving most of the difficulties here is the m=10^17 kg of the
> black hole. That mass was set by the requirement that the tidal
> forces not be too strong for the desired acceleration. With that
> mass, you also get r=100 m for the distance that the passengers have
> to be from the black hole. You can indeed reduce m by shaping the
> field like this, but essentially r has to get smaller. 100 m is
> already pretty darn close to be getting to a black hole. If you
> reduce r to 10 m, then the total mass of your pancake-swarm of black
> holes can be 100 times smaller than what we've been discussing.
> The price you pay for that is that the payload's volume is now
> pretty limited, and you have a pretty scary situation, where there
> are black holes whizzing around outside the portholes almost
> close enough to reach out and touch. (Careful where you toss the
> garbage!) The reduction in mass is good, but I don't think it
> qualitatively changes any of the considerations we've been discussing.
> 
> One thing that wasn't obvious to me was whether gravitational
> radiation from the orbiting black holes would be significant.
> I've tried to estimate it, and the result I get is that the
> radiated power is about 10^-15 W, so that would be negligible.

The power of a black hole with a mass of 1 x 10^17 kg would be 3 x 10^-2 
W.  A black hole a 10^2 times smaller would be 10^4 times more powerful, 
or up to 3 x 10^2 W.  But remember, that's the power of an individual 
black hole.  If you've arranged a grid of them in front of them to get a 
fairly uniform gravitational field, then they're going to add together 
to make a luminous intensity.  What that would be depends on the exact 
arrangement, since if the plane (of presumed uniform power density) were 
truly infinite, the illumination would be infinite as well.

-- 
Erik Max Francis && max@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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