Cosmo 101

Forgive the lack of a post last night I was at a wedding and it took much longer than initially anticipated. But I have come to a decision. With this class and all of the other things I am doing. I think I’m going to only write a post once during the weekend (Friday- Sunday). Ok if figured out how we do velocity. If we are just trying to find the velocity of a thing we us normal (or coordinate) time. So now I think it’s time to discuss some interesting properties of gravity. Ok so let’s say we are characters in a sci-fi movie and we are going to visit a black hole. To our horror one of our androids slip over the edge of the observation deck of our spaceship and falls towards the black hole. As much as that android was useful, helpful and part of the team, this mishap provides us with a scientific opportunity. We watch the poor little android as he is sucked further towards the back hole and see a confirmation of general relativity. You remember the experiment with the gobstoppers when we feel towards the earth. The same thing happens to the android. As he falls gravity pulls on his feet more than on his head and he gets stretched. Also gravity pushes him inward and his arms get compressed. This goes on until he gets stretched into a thin string and finally sucked beyond the event horizon. This event has one of the coolest names in science; we say the android underwent spaghettification. Also, and I won’t provide an example for this just take my word for it, the curvature of spacetime messes with the lengths of things and the wavelengths of light. These effects are not due to special relativity, they are not associated with time dilation or length dilation, they are solely due to the curvature of spacetime. But I don’t know why. Perhaps I will have more information on Monday.