Huge Black Hole

[Buzz]

Wes Tausend
Here's my evidence. We know that we live in a four dimensional world (up, down. sideways and time) but it looks like a three dimensinal world. Or does it? Imagine you are touring a skyscraper with your grandchild. The child is asking, "Grandpa (or Grandma), why do people on the ground look so small?" You can say, "It's because everything we view is slightly historic because of the limited speed of light (or matter). Matter is expanding so fast that stuff close looks big. And stuff far away looks small because it was, a longer moment ago. The different history (time) taken to see it is the fourth dimension in all its glory. The expansion has become so fast, even slightly earlier, everything was a singularity. I read this in the Lounge, little one, so it must be true.

Good stuff, Wes. Right up to this part which, while interesting from a theorizing for the fun of it point of view (and it IS fun), seems to me a gross over-complication of a very simply explained phenomena. I can just picture the blank stare from your grandkid after that explanation.
Firstly, given the speed of light at the relatively tiny distance we're talking about, any historical variation in mass or size would be way too small to be observed. The objects appear smaller simply because the path of light basically radiates outward through the pupil from the small spot on the back of your retina. As distance from the eye's pupil increases, so does the field of view. Distant objects appear smaller just because they take up a proportionally smaller percentage of the overall field of view. I will run this by the next kid I see and I'm sure they will nod and say "Got it."

Back to the black hole, though - one other point I disagree with is your idea that matter drawn in must exit the other side somewhere. In generally accepted theory, it doesn't. It is all drawn in towards center where the massive gravitational forces condense - not "tear apart" - everything into an unimaginably dense state. In a worm hole, however, where (theoretically) two black holes are close enough in proximity that their event horizons (basically, the "outer boundary layer" of a black hole or the distance from center beyond which nothing including light can escape or reverse their motion towards the center) merge or interact, there exists the theoretical possibility of motion or passage through compressed or, as in your folded paper example, "folded" time/space.

The whole concept of the black hole blows the mind and rocks the imagination partly because of the absurdly staggering numbers they generate. For example, they can vary in mass from relatively tiny to millions, even billions of times the mass of our sun. A theoretical lower limit of mass for a BH to remain stable is roughly the mass of our moon, which is about 7.35x10^22 kg. Thats the number 735 followed by 20 zeros. At that mass, the size of the black hole would be about 1/10ths of a millimeter!!! Folks - putting that in perspective - matter at the center of a stellar black hole the size of -say- a golf ball is so awesomely dense that it would weigh billions of tons!!

Amazing stuff.