this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Heck, I love explaining quantum physics.
Ask me questions! I can dumb it down enough that even a child can understand!
Do time and space realy change places if you go past the event horizon of a black hole? How does that work?
Maybe not the right field of knowledge, but i heard this recently and haven't come along anybody able to dumb it down enoth for me to understand. So I thought I might ask anyway :-)
As far as we can figure it, basically, yeah. Wrapping your brain around the concept is less tricky than you'd think.
So gravity gets stronger the closer you are to a black hole, but at the event horizon things get weird. The extreme curvature of spacetime forces space itself to flow toward the singularity at its center faster than the speed of light, so on the inside there's no "other" direction to point to, even photons emitted straight "out" can't reach the event horizon and end up moving in the same direction as everything else. So space becomes timelike, proceeding inexorably from point A to B.
Time is more complicated, because it's really hard to visualize. If you fall into a black hole, you'll pass through all the outward-pointing light that's been failing to escape since the event horizon formed, which makes all the past history of the black hole visible below you. Meanwhile, anything that falls into the black hole after you can be seen falling from above as the downward-pointing photons catch up. The timeline of the inside of the black hole is laid out with the past and future being directions you can point to, making time spacelike.
So, would it be incredibly bright ‘above’ and absolute darkness ‘below?’
That depends on one's position on the path from the event horizon to the singularity. At the event horizon you'll pass all the outward-pointing photons that were emitted the instant the event horizon formed, making all of "down" impossibly bright. Deeper, the only light that reaches you from "down" is light that entered the black hole at an angle and looped around the singularity before you caught up to it, creating a ring of light around a circle of absolute dark. That ring grows thinner and the black circle expands as you get closer to the singularity.
Photons from "above" have the opposite appearance, with an expanding ring of blackness around a contracting circle of incoming light paths.