The Expansion Of Time In The Formation Of A Black Hole Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Hawking (1988: 87-8):

In order to understand what you would see if you were watching a star collapse to form a black hole, one has to remember that in the theory of relativity there is no absolute time. Each observer has his own measure of time. The time for someone on a star will be different from that for someone at a distance, because of the gravitational field of the star. Suppose an intrepid astronaut on the surface of the collapsing star, collapsing inward with it, sent a signal every second, according to his watch, to his spaceship orbiting about the star. At some time on his watch, say 11:00, the star would shrink below the critical radius at which the gravitational field becomes so strong nothing can escape, and his signals would no longer reach the spaceship. As 11:00 approached, his companions watching from the spaceship would find the intervals between successive signals from the astronaut getting longer and longer, but this effect would be very small before 10:59:59. They would have to wait only very slightly more than a second between the astronaut’s 10:59:58 signal and the one that he sent when his watch read 10:59:59, but they would have to wait forever for the 11:00 signal. The light waves emitted from the surface of the star between 10:59:59 and 11:00, by the astronaut’s watch, would be spread out over an infinite period of time, as seen from the spaceship. The time interval between the arrival of successive waves at the spaceship would get longer and longer, so the light from the star would appear redder and redder and fainter and fainter. Eventually, the star would be so dim that it could no longer be seen from the spaceship: all that would be left would be a black hole in space. The star would, however, continue to exert the same gravitational force on the spaceship, which would continue to orbit the black hole.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, according to General Relativity, gravity involves the relative expansion of time intervals, as between ticks of a clock — the closer to the centre of mass in a gravitational field, the more relatively expanded the time intervals. This is why the watch of an astronaut on the surface of a star ticks relatively ever more slowly as the spatial dimensions of a star contract under gravity, with the time intervals eventually expanding to ∞, relative to the time intervals at the orbiting spaceship.

The redshift of the light emitted from the collapsing star, on the other hand, is due to the relative expansion of space intervals between photons — reducing their relative frequency — as light moves from the relatively contracted space intervals near the event horizon to the relatively expanded space intervals where the orbiting spaceship is located.