Black holes keep sucking me in

  

There are many things I cannot and never will understand about physics. Yet I continue to try. I’ve read so much about black holes, it hurts. 

There’s a mystery about them that illustrates the ridiculous nature of reality. In a black hole, our current laws of physics may cease to exist. 

An acquaintance of mine once gave a sermon about how ridiculous the claim was that two plus two may not equal four in a black hole. He was suggesting this was a denial of objective reality. The congregation laughed at the thought. 

To be fair, it depends what you mean by “objective.” The theory of relativity would suggest that some things are relative, dependent on the observer. Those at the top of a mountain experience time at a slower pace than those at sea level. Gravity speeds up time. 

Once you near a black hole, the gravitational pull is so strong that time goes into overdrive. A mere second on the event horizon, the point before you get ripped to shreds, is equivalent to a thousand years on earth. Once actually in the black hole, time might wrap back onto itself allowing you to go back to an earlier time. As some speculate, you might actually enter a “white hole” within the black hole, where time reverses and you de-age yourself out of existence. If only we could put some of that in a bottle. 

But no one has ever or ever will be in a black hole, as the closest one is 1,500 light years away. Besides, you would never survive entry after being pulled to shreds in a rather technical term called spaghettification. 

Infinity is another perplexing concept. Do some things go on forever? Does, for example, the universe simply continue, as it cannot be demonstrated there is in fact an outer edge? If it stretches for infinity, one can assume (as some have) that there is a limitless number of galaxies and therefore a limitless number of possibilities for life. 

Theorists take this to the next level, suggesting there could be multiverses, where there are endless possibilities for life. Just think – if the universe is actually endless, then there are endless possibilities of earths and outcomes that could very much resemble ours but be slightly different. That tuna sandwich you ate today could be a chicken sandwich in another universe. 

 That’s a hard one to wrap one's mind around, so let’s bring it down to a more practical level. Imagine cutting a carrot in half over and over again. If one could slice each new half with an increasingly microscopic knife, would the halving ever stop? Theoretically, you should be able to continue to do this infinitely. At such a small scale, however, there is a limit. There’s a point, according to scientific theory, where you can no longer cut the distance in half – because at this point, distance no longer can be measured. In fact, time can no longer be measured because it no longer exists at the quantum level. This is called a Plank – a unit that’s a quadrillion times smaller than one quadrillionth of a meter. It’s small. 

How do physicists know this? Sometimes I doubt they really do. But more often than not, their theories are eventually proven. It took over 80 years to demonstrate that gravitational waves are produced when black holes collide. In 2016, two large observatories in the United States showed that a very small gravitational wave passed through the earth as a result of two black holes colliding a billion light years away. Space-time was disrupted for a brief millisecond. 

We observed the ripple effect of something that happened one billion years ago. 

Wrap your head around that.