There is truly no such thing as infinity, it is purely fictional and just means the numbers keep rising and rising. Also, even circles don't really have an infinite number of sides/corners, they are very well defined but at the atomic scale -- this is physics my friend, you cannot clearly define everything and thus you save yourself from eternal agony and just say its "good enough"

of course there's such a thing as infinity, have you never taken a calculus course?

This post was edited by Abstraction on Dec 11 2008 12:18am

so this means a circle is not a circle?

I was making a kind of semantic point that the word 'infinite' falls under a variety of descriptions, in both mathematics and in more concrete terms. Infinite in number, infinite in size, infinite in series ... all of these will have different applicantions inside and outside equations. More particulary the "real world" sense of 'infinite' with respect to black holes is divided: they are infinitely dense, so this means their density is unimaginably great; we can't observe or really imagine this density, so it's unfathomable [a 2nd sense]; the density of two different black holes should be distinct, so the density of a given black hole is uniquely great [a 3rd sense], etc. It's no objection to what you're saying, but it's a way of saying that 'infinite' has a variety of meanings, and it's not the same infinity each time, even if it's infinite density being considered.

"In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)" - Ludwig Wittgenstein

It's interesting stuff, because we're talking about an event or singularity in which we've gone beyond a certain threshold in which light begins to bend back into the dying star, so that now light can't escape because it's caught within the Schwarzschild Radius and the escape velocity is so fast, and then we've got density and mass but no volume, so we're talking about a really strange beast. What really interests me is gravity in all of this. Since we've got so much mass, we're going to have a lot of gravity. The idea I discussed earlier in the topic brings up the notion that over time, we've lost gravity via black holes, and so gravity has become a weaker force; or, we could say that gravity has leaked out into another universe or pocket-universe. the effect must be cumulative if the idea is right, because black holes don't really suck up all of their surroundings. That's because of the field or Schwarzschild Radius around them. I could be off-base with that sexy idea, but it's probably no more far-fetched than the idea that Einstein-Rosen bridges give us worm holes

This post was edited by RewtheBrave on Dec 11 2008 01:52am

A kind of a picky point but if you are referring to the 'event horizon' then that is the point at which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, and as the speed of light is the fastest anything can go, nothing can escape.

You would only get infinite gravity at the centre of the black hole (or at the singularity) from Newton's gravity equation: F = GMm/R²

This post was edited by xNick on Dec 11 2008 02:54am

well, its my first year of calc and what we've learned so far has told me that infact we're 2 stupid 2 deal with infinity xP (L'hopitals rules), I just meant infinity as a number doesn't exist...because its not, its a rising number -- forever rising.