Yes, that Sasha 🍉

Non-binary 🏳️‍⚧️⬛🟪⬜🟨🏳️‍⚧️
They/them

Anarchist/your local idiot with a guitar

If you’re an Aussie

If you eat food

And if you live on Earth

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  • 23 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 12th, 2023

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  • I briefly worked in this area of physics, it’s complicated and depends on your definition of a particle and which quantum gravity model you’re talking about.

    To simplify things you can just ask the same thing about non-quantum gravity. Why does gravity escape the black hole? The painfully mundane answer is that the black hole is gravity, it’s not escaping itself. Gravitational waves can’t be emitted from inside the black hole but that’s because those are a form of radiation and not the structure of spacetime.

    This is specifically important because even quantum gravity (the kind with gravitons) still has this distinction. Particles belong to a field and are excitations of it, the gravitational field itself is not made of those particles. The force associated with that field is mediated by gravitons, but what that really means is complicated and honestly possibly just the result of a cool mathematical trick. It also comes with a bunch of crazy behaviour where you have particles that can break the laws of physics by just kinda doing it so quickly that nature blinks and misses it.

    The point is, the quantum gravitational field is enough for the black hole to do its job when objects come by, gravitons don’t actually need to escape, though they are involved in complicated ways.









  • Oh yes let’s talk about my favourite subject ever!

    The coolest thing I know of comes from wondering why bent spacetime makes you move at all. The answer is that you always move through time and the bending of spacetime actually turns a bit of time into space and vice versa.

    Unnecessary tangent

    For a horrible but intuitive explanation of how this works, time is kinda just a direction and bending sorta rotates things so that time looks like it’s one of the space directions. Just like turning to the left makes what was your left look like it’s straight ahead.

    This leads to my favourite saying about black holes, once you enter them you can no more escape falling to the singularity than you can escape tomorrow.


  • There’s basically no way to answer these questions using real physics I’m afraid.

    It definitely can’t close it’s mouth faster than the speed of light. Yes it would have a strong gravitational pull, almost definitely so strong that it would just collapse into a black hole and not be able to exist. If it weren’t that dense, then it would basically just be a big diffuse gas cloud that couldn’t do much anyway, it would basically have to be a proto galaxy to not collapse into one.

    If it’s using magic to exist, then anything is on the table.


  • That’s not entirely accurate, the force it applies to close it’s mouth would probably travel at or close to the speed of sound along its jaw, but it could reach the speed of light by applying that force if you ignore a number of problems. One of which is that it will turn into a black hole at that scale, it’s much too dense.

    On your second point, it’s hard to make any of those into galaxy killers. Supermassive black holes exist at the centre of virtually every galaxy and don’t do a ton, and even quasars only have limited killing range as there are limits to how collimated a beam of radiation can be. White holes are more complicated and I don’t have enough space in a single comment to go into the nuances, but they’re about as harmless as black holes really.

    The only thing I can think of that would destroy all life in a galaxy would also destroy the universe, and that’s to trigger a false vacuum decay, but that might not be possible anyway.




  • There’s plenty of bad shit here too.

    The country voting to not recognise that the traditional owners deserve a voice.

    Our government continuing to fuel the climate apocalypse.

    Housing affordability is locking basically every young person out of the market.

    A lot of my friends are losing their jobs because the economy says they aren’t profitable enough to employ.

    Federal and state governments enacting policies to make it harder for independents to challenge them by restricting funding.

    Fucking NIMBYs everywhere.

    Detention centres still exist for some fucking reason.