Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Relative time

In many sources, we have seen space-time curvature, such as Palkia and Dialga in Pokemon, Kronos in Percy Jackson, and the like. But of course, the most understandable and reasonable one is without a doubt Interstellar. Relativity is the curve of space-time around gravity. That of course is the general relativity. There is also special relativity, but that has almost nothing to do with the movie, so let's just discuss the topic of general relativity. General relativity is the combination of special type and Newton's law of universal gravitation, and it provides a way we can see gravity and space-time using geometric solutions. The most important part of this is the black hole, which is a mass of pure gravitational force, in other words, just a big chunk of mass compressed into a small space. Even though it has mass, it still has the same gravitational force, so even if the sun was a black hole, the planets would still revolve around it, but it would be the size of a basketball. Considering that, since a smallest actual black hole is many thousands of times bigger than the sun, the gravitational force would be so strong that it could bend space-time curvature. For example, the curvature of the solar system would be small.

 However, the space time curvature of the black hole is so strong that it looks something like a vortex:

And that central point, my friends, is the singularity.  As soon as you step into the curve, time slows as you get closer to the center. Finally, at a point call the event horizon, you will be lost forever. Not that you will actually be lost, but you will be moving so slow, that everything around you will be lost to time. In the movie, they showed that even though Cooper and Amelia had only been on Miller's planet for a few hours, their companion on board the Endurance had aged 24 years and 2 months because the planet was so close to the black hole. Also on that planet Miller had simply been killed minutes before they arrived, but they had been getting signals from him for decades because of the time-space interference of the Gargantua. Also in the movie, it showed that he aged slower in the black hole as about 60 years had passed since he entered it. One question I have about this question of general relativity in the movie is that he only aged 60 years after crossing the event horizon, considering that he spent at least a minute in there, shouldn't it have been around a few billion years? It may have been caused because he traveled back in time during his interaction with the 5 dimensional beings, but wouldn't he have to be there before the creation of Gargantua for the time he takes to get out of the black hole(since it is also dilated making it a few billion years)and near Saturn? Also we discussed spaghettification. His future self may have saved him, but the ship should have been destroyed by pulling apart, not by getting hit by numerous beams of light particles, and wouldn't it have been too late for him to not get spagghetified?

Anyway, it was a great movie that gave me lots of ideas and question. GO BELLS!


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