Thursday 29 September 2022

The Distortion Of Space-Time Around Black Holes Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 142):
The smaller a black hole is, the more strongly spacetime is distorted in its immediate vicinity (in effect, spacetime has to be wrapped more tightly to surround a smaller black hole). Distorting spacetime strongly implies the presence of strong gravitational fields, and Stephen Hawking has shown that the fierce gravity near such a hole would excite the quantum vacuum to produce real particles, paid for by the gravitational energy of the hole. Particles would boil off from the hole into the outside world, while the hole itself would lose mass and eventually evaporate completely away in a burst of subatomic debris.


Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of the General Theory of Relativity, viewed through Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, gravity is the relative contraction of space intervals, and relative expansion of time intervals, with increasing proximity to the centre of mass.

What the authors here describe as the tight wrapping of space-time actually describes the geodesic trajectories of bodies orbiting a black hole, with 'tighter' orbits — the tracing of smaller circles — around smaller black holes than around larger ones.

The reason why geodesics — the shortest path between two points — are curved towards the centre of mass is because space intervals are contracted in that direction. 

In the discourse of physics, space is routinely confused with the trajectories of bodies through space, and time is routinely confused with the processes that unfold through time.

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