Scientists Reveal The Truth About 'Time' Inside A Black Hole

 

a black hole's gravitational pull is so powerful it warps and distorts not only light but also time to see how imagine a clock is being sucked into it as the clock gets closer and closer to the black hole it begins to get slower and slower time itself begins to slow down now imagine the clock as it enters the black hole it would actually stop it stops not because it is broken but because inside the black hole time itself doesn't exist these are the words of late theoretical physicist Dr Stephen Hawking but can a black hole really stop time welcome to Science Reads and let's find out if black holes are powerful enough to stop time an experiment for the times imagine you and your friend are super space science stalwarts who decided to test the theory of Dr Stephen hawking who proclaimed that inside a black hole all clocks will come to an absolute stop vis-a-vis time will cease to exist when you are in the singularity of the black hole as you and your friend observe the approaching black holes event horizon from the window of your spaceship you too decide to synchronize your watches these are no

 ordinary watches mind you they both carry a radio signal which on reaching the other watch causes a beeping sound as you two sink your watch you can hear both watches beeping at the same time at an interval of a second your friend smiles as he looks at you this is the final goodbye as you have no idea if he will return or not correction could he return or not for your friend has decided to test the time-stopping power of the black hole by himself a place with theoretically no return he is going to travel inside the black hole so you can record the time dilation between two watches as your friend leaves in his escape pod

 towards the event horizon you can tell the watches are still in sync the second needle moves with the beeping sound coming from the radio signal from your friend's watch but after a while you start noticing the lag in the beeps they have begun to fall behind the second hand of your watch as you try to locate your friend's pod in space the beeping reduces to once every two seconds worried for your friend you peek outside the window pane of the ship and see your friend's pot in the huge distance approaching the photon sphere of the black hole the pod looks like a dot now the beeping reduced to once per 5 seconds as the pod gets closer and closer to the

 event horizon the beeping drops drastically first occurring once per minute then 10 minutes then 20 an hour and sooner maybe more after a week when your watch beeps again you realize it has been so long since the watch beep last time and before you know it you decide to return home because now it's been over a year since you have been waiting for the watch's next beat does that mean that time has become so slow for your friend that a second is like a year for him now and eventually it will stop moving at all and your watch will never beep again how black holes warp time and space black holes are true holes in space with physics so crazy and mind-boggling we still aren't exactly sure what goes down inside it but we do know that the black in the black hole is the darkest black in the universe if you shine a light on a black hole it won't bounce back the hole would just swallow it like it swallows everything else this is why black holes are considered the edge of the universe a one-way exit with no chance of a return ticket the gravitational pull of a black hole not only affects space but also time as your friend's pod gets closer and closer to the black hole as an observer it will slow down for you near a black hole the slowing of time is extreme from the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole time stops for you reading your friend enter the black hole it would figuratively never happen you will see them stuck at the edge of it frozen in time but for your friend time will still be moving if we hypothesize that the immense gravity of the black hole hadn't crushed him their watch is still ticking every second as they cross the event horizon and their path will bend and warp as space and time will warp around them but because they are on the same path as

 space and time they won't feel a difference time will be moving for them as well stay with me there's more to it from outside the event horizon the in-falling entity would see the outside universe as well as the blackness of the event horizon which grows larger and larger as they approach it but once they cross the event horizon something funny happens no matter which

 direction they move or accelerate in

 no matter how quickly or how powerfully they do so they will always inevitably find themselves headed towards a central singularity there is no escape the singularity can be a zero dimensional point if the black hole is stationary or a one-dimensional ring if the black hole is rotating one cannot avoid the singularity once the event horizon is crossed and as your friend falls towards it they will go faster and faster being controlled by the gravity of the black hole the speed of the light barrier would not matter anymore but their clock will keep on ticking from their perspective the time will keep going on so from your perspective your friend is eternally stuck at the border of the event horizon but from your friend's perspective time is still going on for how much time they have before they become one with singularity so which perspective is correct is time moving or not inside the black hole what is time anyways although both perspectives are valid it isn't quite feasible to do a simple conversion from one point of view to the other the reason is quite basic from outside the black hole you can never gain any information about what's going on inside the event horizon while from inside the black hole you can never send any information to the outside also time is more than just something red on a clock it's also a feeling that we have in our heads and bodies as well as the natural rhythms of the world yet in those cases time can become something subject to personal whims for the observer reading the space pod stuck at the edge of the event horizon it is no different than the well-known psychological illusion known as chrono stasis in which a person places a clock at the edge of their vision and then stares at something else for a moment glancing back at the timepiece and focusing on the second hand will make it pause if you just imagine this in your mind mash that like button for me we have all experienced chrono stasis in our life whether it was the boring class you so anxiously wanted to get over when you were so tired for the hours at work to finish or whether it was the time you had to listen to your parents friends who so relentlessly showered you with unsolicited advice and you kept staring at the clock for the damn second hand to move the question then becomes what is the relationship between our perceptions of time and the time physicists are talking about perhaps the answer to this question lies in the ever so mysterious center of the black hole we need more data however this is where our understanding breaks down Einstein's theory of gravity seems to predict that time itself is destroyed at the center of the hole and time comes to an abrupt end there therefore a black hole was described as the reverse of creation but we still do not know how or why time could come to an abrupt end our knowledge regarding this matter is as limited as to how time was created in the first place Einstein's theory of gravity no longer applies at these tiniest scales of distance and therefore new laws of nature must be identified that describe what happens at the center of a black hole unfortunately we cannot do a direct experiment to find out because no information or evidence can ever get back out of a black hole that's what makes it so important to locate and study black holes from a distance at the same time we need to keep working on our theories so that we can more confidently predict what might happen inside a black hole so what do you think did the time really stop inside the black hole for your friend or did the beeping of the watch stop for you because the radio waves could not escape the black hole once your friend crossed the boundary of the photon sphere tell us in the comments