Re: starship-design: Black holes: a mystery

[jimaclem@juno.com]

On Mon, 21 Jul 1997 14:22:50 -0700 kyle <stk@sunherald.infi.net> writes:
>Greetings:
>Ken Wharton sent me this puzzle awhile back, and I haven't figured it
>out yet. Perhaps some of you have ideas?
>
>It's a well-established idea in physics that there's no such thing as
>action-
>at-a-distance.  All forces are intermediated by particles. 
>Electromagnetism
>is passed around by photons, gravity is transmitted with gravity waves
>(or
>gravitons) etc.
>
>So what happens when you're just outside of a black hole's event
>horizon?
>Something is pulling you toward the black hole, very powerfully, but
>what?
>If gravitons are emerging from the black hole to pull you in, then 
>they
>must be travelling faster than light; not even light can escape a 
>black
>hole.  So how can gravitons escape??
>
>The traditional answer might say that these gravitons are "virtual", 
>so
>they can travel faster than light, but that merely passes on the
>question of what
>a virtual graviton (or photon) really is.  Does it exist?  If so, how
>can it
>travel FTL?  Does it transmit information FTL?  If not, why not?
>
>Good luck.
>
>Kyle Mcallister
>
Well, I'm no physicist, but here is my two cents worth.  If you model
space-time as a compressible fluid, and the presence mass causes this
fluid to compress, then you need no transmission, or, put it another way,
space-time itself is the transmitter.  This is pure hypothesis, and I
have no details yet on how well this model works.  I'll post them when I
finish with them.

Jim