http://urbanhonking.com/cowboyz/2007/01/03/this_intense_gravitational_fie/ Fri, 14 Oct 2016 21:37:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://urbanhonking.com/cowboyz/2007/01/03/this_intense_gravitational_fie/#comment-1322 Wed, 03 Jan 2007 22:48:24 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/cowboyz/2007/01/03/this_intense_gravitational_fie/#comment-1322 Hi Julianne. The short answer is you are correct; the longer answer is that your question isn’t really meaningful as posed.
On the “yes” side: If one twin went close to the “edge” of a black hole for a while and returned to stand next to her twin, the traveling twin would be younger (ie, would have aged more slowly).
On the “wha?” side, your body would be torn apart soon after entering the black hole by so-called tidal forces (a stronger gravitational pull of the parts of your body that are closer to the center). Can someone age after they die? Also, both special and general relativity made fundamental changes to what we think of as simultaneity; under either of these descriptions, it is not meaningful to talk about things happening at the same time when they are in different places. Thus, since one person in the black hole must be in another place from the person outside and cannot escape as anything resembling something that would have a birth date, we cannot meaningfully compare their ages.
See, for example this: http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.html (which is good except for the paragraph that starts “In practice, you will actually become invisible to Penelope…” which is just nonsense) and this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity.
I always enjoy your blog lots.

]]> http://urbanhonking.com/cowboyz/2007/01/03/this_intense_gravitational_fie/#comment-1321 Wed, 03 Jan 2007 15:39:29 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/cowboyz/2007/01/03/this_intense_gravitational_fie/#comment-1321 a miracle indeed. couldn’t find the info on the aging, but at least learned about ‘fuzzballs’ in the process.

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