Black Holes are cool!

[Blackmane]

Originally Posted by GameMaster

Someday humans will live aboard massive stations in space that cruise at super fast speeds allowing them to live much, much longer then they do on Earth.

Well, only longer if you compare their lifespan to how much time passes on Earth. The people on the spaceship will feel the same timeframe, everyone else just ages more due to relativity.

I found out that you can't actually see something go into a black hole. No matter how long you wait and watch, you won't see anything ever actually go in (if you are watching on the outside) since the gravity of the hole makes it harder and harder for light to get away, so as something gets closer, the light it emits takes longer and longer to get to you.

Fascinating stuff. I have always loved space too.

[GiMpY-wAnNaBe]

ya, i heard about that, as soon as the person crosses the event horizon, theoreticaly they will just seem to freeze on the spot.........they will have already gone in teh black hole, but the gravitational pull would be just enough to keep the photons from moving.....pretty crazy stuff

[thatmariolover]

Yes, but the interesting question is whether or not peoples perception of time changes. As you said, everything is relative. To us, it would seem that humans travelling at insane velocities were living a very long time. But would our brains compensate and would we view time the same way we view it now?

Eh? Eh? ANSWER ME DAMMIT!

Fungah...

[Blackmane]

It's very hard to be sure. We can only speculate as to how humans will perceive it. However, experimenting with atomic clocks moving at high velocities compared to them being stationary shows that the speeding clock actually ticks slower. Who knows if time actually slows at high speeds.

[Canyarion]

That's some crazy stuff. REALLY interesting.

Shows how puny we are.

Do you know the paradigm theory of Kuhn? It explains that people believe in a theory because it's 'popular'. It's the 'best' theory, but MOST likely not the truth. Everybody believes in it untill someone comes with a new and better theory.

Think atoms and stuff. People always thought that atoms are the smallest things, but now they've discovered that it actually consists of smaller 'things'... quartz or something.

[Neo]

Originally Posted by Canyarion

but now they've discovered that it actually consists of smaller 'things'... quartz or something.

lol, that's "quarks" my dear boy.

[Canyarion]

What are quartz again father??

[Blackmane]

Originally Posted by Canyarion

What are quartz again father??

It's QUARKS, dear boy, QUARKS.

That makes a lot of sense because human beings always need a way to explain something, even if it is not correct. It just is a kind of satisfaction in thinking we know what's going on. Yet we keep on discovering new things and running into newer tougher questions that need bigger, badder theories to explain them.

Man, science is a neverending cycle.