Last night B and I held a tenuous conversation regarding the Theory of Relativity and Black Holes. I was attempting to assert that if you were inside a black hole, you would age slower than someone NOT in a black hole. I have no idea if that is true (if you do, please leave a note here) but in the course of things, I happened to discover that one can, in fact, escape a black hole after being swallowed by it, contrary to what I (and Einstein) had previously assumed. This is terrific news. Granted, you might not be put together in the same way, but ’tis better to emerge as a bright speck of light (or a “glimmering,” as quantum mechanics would have it) than never to emerge at all.
Light is a miracle.
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a miracle indeed. couldn’t find the info on the aging, but at least learned about ‘fuzzballs’ in the process.
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.