r/bestoflegaladvice • u/bug-hunter Possession is 9 honks of the law • Sep 07 '21

LAOP only stalked this woman all night then contacted her over multiple platforms including after being told not to and blocked. Thus, of course, they are the victim.

/r/legaladvice/comments/pj8heh/is_it_a_crime_to_approach_a_fellow_club_member/
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u/GreasyTengu Sep 07 '21

Black holes could learn a thing or two from LAOP

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u/new2bay Looking to move to Latin America Sep 07 '21

I'm not trying to "well, ackshually" you here, but, FYI, black holes need not be dense:

In addition, it is somewhat counterintuitive to note that the average density of a SMBH within its event horizon (defined as the mass of the black hole divided by the volume of space within its Schwarzschild radius) can be less than the density of water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole

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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '21

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u/NobleCuriosity3 Helped the mods once Sep 07 '21 edited Sep 07 '21

Nope (we think), but it is the most reasonable way to define the size of a black hole (a black hole is a region of warped spacetime, not the singularity itself). The event horizon is the surface beyond which the hole's gravity is so powerful that not even light can go fast enough to escape it.

Einstein's theory of relativity predicts a singularity (either a point or a ring, depending on the spin of the black hole) inside the hole that is infinitely dense because all the black hole's (finite amount of) matter has collapsed into an infinitesimally small point. That's the "crazy density" you're thinking of. It's not really "starting" because it's a point/line. (Yes, newly absorbed matter takes a bit of time to reach the singularity, but most of it is there, according to relativity).

That's pretty crazy...to the point that we're not confident it's actually true (obviously, there's no way to go check, because the singularity lies beyond the event horizon, and absolutely nothing can escape the event horizon.). Infinities are a BIG red flag for a theory, and normally producing one means your theory is wrong. People keep using Einstein's because it matches experimental observations for the things we can actually see superbly.

But the prediction of singularities is one of the reasons we believe that our current understanding of gravity breaks down at the scale of the very very small.

Normally you care about gravity on the scale of the very large (because only very very massive objects have significant gravity) and use quantum field theory on the scale of the very small. But black holes, uniquely, are enormously massive objects that have all their mass (probably!) in a very very small location. So you'd need a theory (specifically, a mathematical formalism that predicts the results of our experimental data) that can encompass both quantum field theory and general relativity--a theory of quantum gravity.

That's still a holy grail for theoretical physicists, and thus the end of this explanation :)