Question about the properties of light and black holes

originally posted by: kwakakev
It is the mass of the electron that is causing the gravitational lensing in detecting black holes.

As far as we know that is completely wrong. The reason our sun won't become a black hole is because the electrons in it will create enough pressure to keep it from collapsing into a black hole or a neutron star. This is because the Pauli exclusion principle creates electron degeneracy pressure. If the mass of the star exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit which is ~1.4 times the mass of our sun, then the mass is great enough to overcome this electron pressure and we believe this can cause the electrons to collapse which results in a neutron star made mostly of neutrons. If the mass is even greater like over 3 solar masses then the pressure to collapse is even greater and a black hole can form. There could be a handful of electrons at the surface of the neutron star but they would have very little mass relative to the neutron star mass, and while we don't know exactly what form the mass in a black hole has, the above mentioned theories suggest it is unlikely to contain any significant amount of electrons.

Even in a star like our sun, the gravitational effect of the electron probably isn't a whole lot more than 1/1836 of the total gravitational effect, which is the ratio of electron mass to proton mass. Most of the sun's gravitational attraction by far would come from protons and neutrons, not electrons, because of that ratio.

I believe light is effected by the black hole. The space that the light travels through is bent into the black hole, so the light is going "straight" ... and the "straight" road is being bent into the black hole.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

I don't believe light is visible, we only observe a change in the medium, a disruption let's say. Nothing emits light, a lightbulb lighter or the sun, if it wasn't for the 'gas' you wouldn't see it.

Light is not a constant nor does it have a speed, it propagates through a field. The field act as a conductor.

a reply to: Sargeras

Light is not a wave nor a particle.
Fields acting upon fields, light is mere a byproduct, just like gravity is, it doesn't exists on its own.

originally posted by: intergalactic fire
a reply to: Sargeras

Light is not a wave nor a particle.
Fields acting upon fields, light is mere a byproduct, just like gravity is, it doesn't exists on its own.

Sorry, that is false.
phys.org...

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

a digital reconstruction of data?
What is false?

The only thing you see in the 'photo' is like i said, a disruption in the field. Just like the waves in a pond when you throw a stone

a reply to: intergalactic fire

They measured it hitting itself. Nothing can not hit itself. Might as well claim there are no particles in a particle accelerator because they don't actually see the particle just the effects.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

no particles are measured but field perturbations

a reply to: revswirl

It doesn't take a black hole to noticeably bend light -- the gravity of our Sun can do that.

Experiments by Arthur Eddington and William Wallace Campbell in which the position of stars were measured as their light shown past the Sun during a total eclipse have shown that the gravity of the sun can have this same effect of bending the light. Precise measurements of this bending totally agree with the predictions made by Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity.

In fact, Campbell did his experiment in 1922 because he set out to prove that Einstein was wrong. He was expecting that he would not see the starlight being bent as Einstein postulated, but he in fact was the first to actually measure the effect with enough precision to show it to be in complete agreement with Einstein. Campbell, being the good scientist that he was, admitted he was wrong.

What's happening is that space itself is being bent by gravity, and light traveling in a "straight line" through space will actually need to follow the bent space. So the light is still moving in a straight line through space, but that space is bent.

a reply to: intergalactic fire

So basically you just want to ignore all the evidence, including the photons hitting each other, which they saw in the measurements. Apparently the non-existent photons hit other non-existent photons, but they really did not because they don't exist, so nothing hit nothing, even though they can see they did.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

-I never said there was nothing hitting nothing and what are you talking about photons hitting photons, what evidence?

I’m hoping not to confuse the matter any more than it already is, but make no promises. I’ll try to explain a couple concepts as best I understand them, and believe they pretty much conform to current mainstream thinking.

1. The Nature of Space
Space, in and of itself, is only a geometric volume. It has no physical properties or energy to be warped, twisted, stretched, curved, etc. Statements about “curved space”, etc are misleading in that it implies space has some set of physical properties of it’s own. Space is simply the geometric volume which contains the existing energy/mass of the universe. To say that space expands only means that the volume has increased.

2. Spacetime and General Relativity
How particles and forces influence each other are expressed mathematically as geometric relationships, describing how the particles, etc being measured occupy the volume of space. When GR refers to “spacetime curvature”, it’s describing how matter changes it’s geometric distribution within space based on it’s energy and momentum as it moves through time. It doesn’t imply that space itself (sans time) has a curvature. Also, GR is strictly a theory of geometry and does not state that space has a fabric or substance or any other physical property. In Einstein’s view, the curvature of spacetime (not space) is a consequence of gravity’s influence on the way matter is distributed in it’s passage through time. In any case, flat space and curved spacetime are not incompatible features of our universe, and work quite well together. But don’t confuse the 2 as being the same thing, because they are very different concepts.

The difference between space and spacetime isn’t easy to visualize, which leads to a lot of confusion and misconceptions. I’m not sure I have an easy answer, but I’ll give it a shot...

Space vs Spacetime
Spacetime is the arena in which all physical events take place - an event is represented as a point in spacetime and specified by its time and location. An event in classical relativistic physics is defined using coordinates (x,y,z,t), which is the location of an elementary (point-like) particle at a particular time. A region of spacetime itself can be viewed as the union of all events taking place within it, much the same way that a line is the union of all of its points. The ‘world line’ of a particle or light beam is the path that the particle or beam takes in spacetime and represents the history of the particle or beam. The ‘world line’ of the orbit of the Earth in spacetime is usually depicted as two spatial dimensions x and y (the plane of the Earth's orbit) and a time dimension (t) orthogonal to x and y, resulting in a helix. In space alone, however, the time coordinate is dropped and the orbit of the Earth is represented as an ellipse (the most common representation).

Put another way, in a Euclidean space the seperation between 2 points is measured by the distance between two the 2 points . Simple enough. The distance is a purely spacial measurement. In spacetime, however, the displacement (interval) between 2 events is a completely different calculation and includes a temporal seperation factor of c^2dt^2 (the speed of light squared multiplied by the time difference squared). So, in the case of purely time-like paths, geodesics are (locally) the paths of greatest separation (spacetime interval) as measured along the path between two events, whereas in Euclidean space and Riemannian manifolds, geodesics are paths of shortest distance between two points. The curvature of spacetime refers to the non-Euclidean geometry used to describe it.

For physical reasons, a spacetime continuum is mathematically defined as a four-dimensional, smooth, connected Lorentzian manifold. The Lorentz metric determines the geometry of spacetime, as well as determining the geodesics of particles and light beams. About each point (event) on this manifold, coordinate charts are used to represent observers in reference frames, using Cartesian coordinates (x,y,z,t). The concept of geodesics is central in general relativity, since geodesic motion is considered as pure inertial motion in spacetime, and is free from any external influences.

As far as space vs spacetime goes, I heard it (somewhere?) expressed as an old Chinese proverb:
“An expanding universe demands spacetime curvature. However, it doesn’t demand space curvature.”

Now, to thoroughly confuse things, if you’re familiar with the Schwarzschild or Friedmann spatially flat solutions in GR, you’ll note that these give motion to test bodies to account for ‘curved time’. Chew on that one for awhile!

Finally, as successful and comprehensive as GR has been, the notion of curved spacetime as presented in GR isn’t the only rodeo in town. Since 3 of the 4 ‘fundamental forces’ have been successfully expressed via quantum theory, many would like to complete the picture by deriving a workable theory of quantum gravity. This would do away with curved spacetime and gravity would be treated as a force in 3D. So far it hasn’t panned out, though. It seems GR can’t be renormalized and unacceptable infinities are encountered at high energy scales, and therefore a valid QFT for gravity hasn’t yet been derived.

I didn’t intend to be so longwinded. On top of that, I probably just made matters worse. Carry on...

Peace