instead of an "escape velocity" could there be an "escape mass" i.e. the mass an object would have to have in order to be able to bend space-time enough to offset what the black hole is doing?

Hmm hasn't it been shown that energy can be used to create matter? And isn't light a form of energy? I am nowhere near being an astro-physicist, and haven't read Einstein's book, but would I be correct in assuming that the vast majority of spce/space-time warping information we have come to know has been amassed by observing black holes?

If that is true, is it not possibble that light DOES have mass, only it is so insignificant that it is virtually undetectable (so low mass that even at light speed it does not have enough energy to cause any physical movement) and is only affected to a noticeable degree by infinite gravity?

As I said, I am not particularly well versed in such things, and cannot fully understand how time could travel faster in one area than it could in another. I am almost definatly wrong in assuming this, but it would seem to me that if you took a pocketwatch anywhere in the universe , it would always tick at one of our earth seconds for each second shown.


But anyway, try not to be too rude when ya tear me a new ass, I don't make it a habit of discussing matters such as this :/

well time and space are stuck together in a sense, so when you think about massive objects displacing space, you can think about displacing space as stretching out time

and we've actually observed this phenomenon without black holes. if you put an atomic clock at a high altitude and another at a low altitude, they'll tick off from each other. by nanoseconds, but still within the error

This post was edited by Derkaderk on Nov 24 2011 12:42pm

Energy can't be used to create matter, because energy and matter are essentially the same thing in different forms. Nuclear energy works because some mass is "lost" during nuclear fission (breaking apart heavy elements like Uranium) or nuclear fusion (combining light elements like Hydrogen). The amount of energy you gain is equal to the amount of mass "lost" multiplied by the speed of light squared. That's what Einstein's famous formula, E = m*c^2 means.

Light does have energy in it. There's a formula that lets you know how much energy an electromagnetic wave contains (light is an electromagnetic wave), and that formula is E = h*f = h*c/lambda (f is the frequency of light, lambda is the wavelength of light).

Gravity distorts the very fabric of space. To get an idea of what this means, imagine a trampoline with no one standing in the middle. If you roll a ball across it, it will travel in a straight line. If, however, someone IS standing in the middle, then the mass of that person will deform the surface of the trampoline. If you roll the ball across the trampoline now, it will curve towards the center. If the ball passes too close to the center, then it will start spiraling around the center until it eventually hits the person's foot. That's the exact same thing that is happening with black holes and light.

But to answer your second paragraph, light waves DO cause physical movement, so to speak. Light also possesses momentum, even though it's very small.

This post was edited by bentherdonethat on Nov 24 2011 12:47pm

Ahh, thank you. I wasn't aware that it worked in that way exactly. However for anything to have momentum (or possibbly the word I am looking for here is inertia, I'm not sure) wouldn't the *something*have to have mass? And if so wouldn't that mean that to a degree light posses a phyiscal property rather than just an energetic property?

Actually
http://www.chalmers.se/en/news/Pages/Chalmers-scientists-create-light-from-vacuum.aspx

They supposed you could do the same with protons, etc. I've always wondered how matter came to be, and I think this is a pretty interesting hypothesis. Energy goes in, matter comes out.

I'm aware of virtual particles being created in a vacuum, but they are created at the same time as their antiparticles. The net change in energy is zero. No energy is created.

This post was edited by bentherdonethat on Nov 24 2011 01:43pm