/sci/ - Science & Math

This is even scarier than flashy unrealistic pictures about the visible black hole 'eating' a star.

Also the sun is going to engulf the whole Earth. Couldn't find a good picture of that.

Hey /sci/, I tried asking this over in /b/ but no amount of porn would get them to give a satisfactory answer.


I bet you guys got this:

Say you're in your spaceship next to a supermassive black hole of known mass (by gravitational lensing measurements, whatever) and, thus, with a known event horizon (ignoring the ergosphere, I assume you can throw some gas in and figure out where the axis of rotation is and avoid it.) The black hole is supermassive so some unlucky dude can pass through the event horizon well before getting spaghettified.

So you send a dude past the event horizon with two ropes trailing behind him to your spaceship outside. The ropes are long enough to be in freefall until after the dude has passed the event horizon. So the dude passes the event horizon holding both ropes the same distance from the singularity. If, once he's past the event horizon, he is still able, the dude is to put one of the ropes on a path that leads it to the singularity quicker or slower than his path. He holds on to the other rope.

You, outside the event horizon, measure the tension in the ropes. Eventually they snap or you let go, but you measure the tension deltas before this. If the ropes have different tension deltas you know that the dude survived passing through the event horizon.

Of course, this has to be impossible. So where is the reasoning wrong?