starship-design: Re: More Symmetry Stuff

[TLG.van.der.Linden@tip.nl (Timothy van der Linden)]

Kevin replied to me:

>> Am I missing something? These seem to be exactly the properties of photons
>> being absorbed by a black hole. They often don't have a common past, but
>> they are likely to have a common future somewhere inside the black hole.
>> 
>
>I think you are missing something here Tim.  Although most of this
>discussion is as far above my head as Tau Ceti,  I think I understand
>Ken here.  
>
>Imagine you are at a black hole (far enough away to avoid nasty gravity
>effects)
>and you are assinged to count and catalog the photons that enter its
>event horizon.
>(so much for the glamour of being a cadet at the starfleet acadamy  ;)
>
>Anyway, the first event you record is two photons arriving from
>different directions and they just happen to have the same wavelength,
>and are traveling in phase (even though by an estimate of their starting
>positions you calculate they originated 10 light-years apart)  both are
>absorbed by the black hole (or at least you assume they have, since you
>never get to actually observe the crossing over) "what a strange
>coincidence" you say to yourself.  Oh well, here comes the next photon. 
>correction, make that photons.  again, there are two more originating in
>different parts of the universe, traveling in phase, and having the same
>wavelenth (although they are a different wavelength than the first
>pair.)  how long before you begin to suspect that this is more than
>coincidence?

OK now that you force me to think deeper than just my initial guess, I've
come up with two solutions:

- Why should those photons come from different directions? Can't they just
travel almost parallel and converge into the blackhole? Should the blackhole
as a whole be coherent? The Sun (and most other larger photon sources) can't
be coherent as a whole either.

- If you could look at the photons that move near towards the event horizon,
you would see them becoming more and more redshifted. In fact at the last
moment they would have a frequency equal to zero. Since phase-difference has
no meaning for particles with zero frequency, they would all look coherent.
(One thing though, while the photons look red-shifted they actually are
blueshifted.)

>Congratulations, you have just witnessed the first coherent radiation
>sink.  For all time, these will be known as "van der Linden black holes"
>;)
>
>> Aren't you looking at the problem with "forward-time"-view? It may be that
>> (mirror-image) antimatter annihilates with our forward-time matter, but that
>> in the future some effect (yet not know by us temporal creatures) creates
>> antimatter once again.
>> (If this makes no sense, it may be because I've lost track of all the
>> mirrors, forward/backward, anti/matters.
>
>
>Hmm,
>How about this:
>
><beautiful ASCII art removed>
>
>From the view of us temporal limited creatures, a particle of Matter was
>exchanged for a particle of Antimatter.  Don't ask me how charge
>conservation is maintained, I'm simply trying to make this
>understandable.  I suppose that for the universe as a whole, charge
>conservation is maintained, or you might try to bring some virtual
>particles into this to balance it all out.

This seems to be the same as I had in mind, thanks.

Tim