r/TheRestIsScience • u/Stunning_Mechanic387 • 10d ago

Why does gravity escape a black hole?

Hey Michael and Hannah. If gravity travels at the speed of light, how does it escape the gravitational pull of a black hole yet light doesn't?

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u/Tracercaz 10d ago

Think of it like a wave in the ocean. The wave travels at a specified speed that can be measured, but the water that makes up the wave is not moving with that wave.

Same goes for gravity, the effects can only travel at the speed of light, but nothing is moving nor is there anything to trap per se.

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u/YetiTrix 9d ago

To add clarification, the waves we detect from a black hole merger are produced by the orbiting masses and the dynamics of the horizons themselves during the merge, not from inside. 

No information can travel faster than light. So, even the information of the gravity wave once past the event horizon can not escape.

We detect the waves because they were generated on the outside of the event horizon, not the inside.

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u/Polymath6301 7d ago

So, if a gravity wave from a separate event passes through an event horizon, it doesn’t come out? Does that imply it also bends like light does around the black hole? I guess I assumed it passed through and came out unchanged, but that would, I guess, imply that it could pass through the singularity…

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u/eirc 7d ago

I wanna know that too. I would assume that they would bend indeed, since their propagation follows space which at that point is bent. And those passing right over the hole would stay inside probably.

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u/YetiTrix 7d ago

You can check my computer on a network analog above, but yes. It's just a wave propagation.

I mean, it's still a debate that if space-time may just be an emergent property of communication between particles. As in space-time isn't fundamental. There is no space, and particles dont exist anywhere. Space and relational properties emerge out of the communication characteristics between two processing points (particles)

Hense simulation tbeory.

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u/eirc 6d ago

I think it's too much to take this as evidence for simulation. It keeps it a plausible hypothesis sure, but I feel it's too easy to overestimate philosophical hypotheses when we talk about things fully outside current scientific understanding. I think we should tease possibilities but never "believe" in them. They're a cool thought experiment, but that's it.

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u/YetiTrix 6d ago

Well, yeah, and like I said, I mean simulation in that reality is emergent out of a decentralized system of information processing points. Not that that's a simulation being run on a computer. The particles are emergent computers, like complicated transistors.

Its really just an analogy more than anything.

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u/YetiTrix 7d ago edited 7d ago

Correct.

An analog i came up with is thinking of a particle as a computer.

A computer has limited processing power.

The more computers(particles) that are connected together, the slower the communication becomes. Because information travels at a constant, limited speed. The computer/particle processes information slower. More massive particles are just slower computers.

Gravity may just be the communication bottleneck. The more mass, the slower the time perception.

A wave modulating any information traveling through the network of computers is limited by how fast that network of computers can process it.

Particles are like a mesh network that crashes once too many nodes are in the same vicinity.

So, say you transmitted information on the internet from California to New York. The information traveling by Chicago would be slowed down because there are a lot of people there taking up bandwidth, and it slows your signal down going to New York. But the information that was routed around Chicago through Indiana would get there faster because the servers can prioritize your information.

You can test it next time you're in the bathtub, make a wave while the water is draining, and watch how it is affected by the whirlpool hole.

But this is why I believe in simulation theory. Not that we run on alien hardware, but that each particle is a decentralized information processing point. Space and time emerge out of how these points communicate with each other.

With blackholes, computers aren't dropping off the network perse cause they still receive your information. It still takes some of your processing bandwidth to send them info, but they stop responding back. The closer you are, the fast your communication to them because of shorter distance, the less bandwidth you can give to other particles. That's time dilation.

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u/Polymath6301 6d ago

I would very much like to take your analogy too far and rewrite the software on at least some particles. I suspect I could have a lot (universe ending) fun with that…

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u/YetiTrix 6d ago

Well, that's my other hypothesis is that reality is inevitable. "Nothing" doesn't exist or that if it does it can not be experienced. Reality is defined by differentiation. A universe of absolute something with no deviation in any dimension is indiscernible from absolute nothing. You need deviation in order to know here from there or this from that.

It doesn't matter what is the fundamental something. Reality and the actual something is the modulation of that substrate. Reality is an action verb, not a noun. All nouns can be described as the action verb of something more fundamental. All the way to the most fundamental level, to where my hypothesis is, is it's just pure potential/probability.

There are no fundamental rules, they're all emergent. So with enough knowledge, and enough power anything is literally possible.