![]() ![]() But that nasty end may not happen immediately. The winner, in a linguistic landslide: spaghettification-which does not sound good. Verdict: False-except…Ĭosmologists vie for the best term to describe what would happen to you if you crossed over a black hole’s so-called event horizon, or its light-gobbling threshold. ![]() It would be possible to survive the leap into the black hole from which you hope to do your communicating in the first place. That’s hardly the same as being able to radio down to Houston from within a black hole’s maw, but it takes you a big step closer.Ĥ. Zillions of those particles create a form of outflowing energy-and energy can be encoded to carry information, which is how all forms of wireless communication work. So the black hole emits a particle to keep everything revenue- neutral. But nature hates when its books are unbalanced-a negative without a corresponding positive is like a debit without a credit. When a particle falls into a black hole, the fact that it’s falling creates another form of negative energy. But even physics may have loopholes, and one of them is something known as Hawking radiation, discovered by, well, guess who. ![]() The accepted truth about a black hole is that its gravitational grip is so powerful that not even light can escape-which is how it got its name. Depending on where in the universe you placed an object with that kind of mass, it could make a real mess of the surrounding worlds-but it doesn’t in the movie. It takes a massive object to generate a gravity field sufficient to fold space-time in half, and the one in the movie would have to be the equivalent of 100 million of our suns, says Gott. One bit of license the Interstellar story did take concerns how the wormhole came to be. There have been attempts to create such conditions in the lab, which is a long way from a real wormhole but at least helps prove the theory. That would require what’s known as negative energy-an energetic state less than zero-to create the portal and keep it open, says Princeton cosmologist J. Punching the necessary holes in that fabric so that you could make your universe-transiting trip would be a bit more difficult. The idea is that if you think of space-time less as a void than as a sort of fabric-which it is-it could, under the right circumstances fold over on itself. Worm holes are a pretty well-accepted part of modern cosmology and it’s Thorne’s theorems that have helped make them that way. ![]()
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