Black hole communications.

Intro to black-holes.

Figure - Around a black hole there is an intense variation in the warping of space - and apparently 'time'. What would the effects be on two groups trying to communicate by radio from close by, to far from the object?

(the white dashes here indicate how the message is progressively physically squashed more and more in length near, and 'slowed down' nearer to the BH)

What would it mean if we could we simulate this 'Time dilation effect' -'timelessly' with a just a modified tape loop?

Cosmic ‘Black-holes’ in space are in fact not really ‘holes’ but super dense objects that create a gravitational field around themselves so strong that even light itself cannot escape. This unique feature means that if one was directly observed, although there would be no actual hole, in the area of the object it would visually appear as if there was a ‘black-hole in space’.

The other effect of such a strong gravitational field would be that it will also warp space and time which is what we are concerned with here.

If there was a support ship ‘parked’ a significant and safe distance from the black-hole being explored, and this support ship was in radio communication with an explorer team who ventured much nearer to the powerful gravity of the black-hole, the very large difference in gravitational fields that each location experienced would have startling effects on the relative flow of time between them and result in very unusual anomalies between the groups if they communicated by radio across the distance, and ‘time distortion’ between them.

This is because for an explorer in the strong gravitational field ‘time’ would be very significantly slowed down compared to the flow of time for the support vessel some significant distance away and in a much weaker field of gravity, but as long as the explores were not so close to the black-hole that even their own radio waves got pulled in they could still genuinely communicate ‘over this time rate difference’ to their support ship by radio.

But how would this sound to each party? how could it be, and how would it seem if, my ‘days’ were passing by as quickly as your ‘hours’ and yet we were still carrying on a conversation, and how could this situation work for 'weeks', 'months' or 'years' on end?

Would one group be talking to someone as they slipped into the past or would they be talking to people slipping further and further into the future? Which point of view would be correct? and where would all the time difference actually ‘be’.

And given how can all of this be re-explained and still make sense timelessly?

(Note, while the 'thought experiment' of considering what would happen if we sent two ships to hang out near a black hole and communicate is interesting, (because it would cause effects directly observable to humans on our scale of living) travelling near to a black hole is extremely impractical.

But the essence of the point being examined here is that "gravity seems to slow 'clock's or 'things' down" - and this is is a real effect that is scientifically examined here on Earth,

See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation )

The corridor tape loop experiment.

Earth to Eagle, what ‘is’ the ‘delay’?

To greatly simplify our understanding of how things might be if we were communicating over a great distance between areas of high and low gravity, and, or high and low time distortion lest simplify the situation by first just considering a factual example and recalling what happens when we communicate over great physical distances using radio.

If you listen to recordings of the Apollo Luna missions you will repeatedly hear a clear ‘beep’ tone at the end of each communication made between the astronauts in space, somewhere ‘between the Moon and new York city’ so to speak, and the Earth based mission control. You will also notice unusually large and regular ‘gaps’ in the communications between questions and answers throughout the conversations.

The ‘beeps’ are produced automatically by the NASA communications systems to make it clear when any one message has ended because without these beeps the gaps of silence between questions and replies would be very confusing leading to astronauts and mission control never being quite sure when the other had finished what they were saying or were waiting quietly for a reply.

These gaps or delays are similar to the kind of delays you get on a long distance phone call especially if it has been routed in a complicated way around the globe and in the Moon missions were an unavoidable result of the greater and greater distances the messages had to travel between the spaceship and Earth as it approached the Moon and the finite speed of light, or radio, signals.

In the case of talking to astronauts actually walking on the moon we can see the gaps or delays in the conversation are caused because the moon is around 400,000 kilometres away from Earth and light, or in this case the radio waves used to communicate with the Apollo command module, travels at ‘only’ 300,000 kilometres per second.

300,000 km per second is of course a phenomenal speed but then the distance to the moon is a much greater distance than we humans are usually used to communicating over, so as a result a question sent to the astronauts as a radio wave while they neared the moon might take over a second to reach them, and even if they responded to the question immediately their answer would likewise take a second to make it back to the radio receivers on Earth, so the total delay each party hears is twice the actual delay caused by the distance.

Figure 38‑1 A simple tape loop can mimic the 'gaps' in long distance communications.

Time gaps are just distance gaps.

To understand this ‘delay’ in a ‘Motion only’ or timeless way it helps to see it just as an unexpected ‘misalignment’ or a simple physical gap, and we could directly see and understand this physical gap using a simple experiment involving a couple of tape recording machines.

We can assume that NASA tried to record all the transmissions to and from the Apollo space craft, and we can imagine that they would have used magnetic tape to do so. So while say, Mission control is transmitting a question to the astronauts at 300,000 km per second it is also being recorded on part of a reel of tape that would be moving past a tape machines record head at a fairly constant rate say for simplicity 3cm per second.

So as the magnetic tape moves past the record head, the transmitted spoken message or question flies out through space such that in that one second the radio message moves 300,000 km the tape moves 3cm.

The astronauts receive the message and radio their reply, and while the messages are flying out to and back from space the tape in the tape recorder is steadily moving on at its fixed 3cm per second.

So if the astronauts happened to be precisely 300,000 km away the gap between a question being sent from earth and an answer coming back would be 2 seconds. This results of course in a real, and physically measurable if you could see it ‘6 centimetre gap’ of silence on the magnetic tape.

And this physical gap on the magnetic tape equates in a sense to the unavoidable time delays, or gaps in communications between mission control and distant astronauts.[1]

The issue you may have here is that I am referring to ‘seconds of time’ in this example, but as explained elsewhere in this book a ‘second’ is in reality just a certain fraction or segment of the earth’s rotation, so when I say ‘in the second the messages take to cover 300,000 km the tape moves 3 cm’ I am only really saying ‘that as the radio signal travels, and the tape moves, the earth also rotates’, and comparing these different movements in terms that are familiar to most readers.

Given that the speed of light or radio waves is basically fixed and constant we can eliminate all references to time, and the Earth’s rotation here and just say ‘the magnetic tape moves past the record and playback heads at one ten billionth the speed of light’.

How long is the question?

At this point it is also worth considering not just the length of the gap between communications between the earth and distant astronauts but also the actual physical length of the outgoing question.

If mission control just asked ‘Are you receiving?’ that might only take one second to say (the Earth might only rotate a particular fraction of a degree while it is being said), which means that because light, and radio waves travel at 300,000 km per second, the actual message if you could see it radiating away from Earth, would actually be ‘300,000 km in length’.

So on the tape machine, with its tap moving steadily at one ten billionth the speed of light this 300,000 km in space translates to just 3cm of tape.

Let's get loopy. Tape Loop intro V2 Earth to Moon.

Now we have a feel for how recordings on tape, measured in centimetres can relate to messages in space that are hundreds of thousands of kilometres long we can completely avoid the need for real long range, superfast communications and make a scaled down model of any situation we want here on Earth.

So we can make the problem of understanding just what happens when people communicate by radio over great distances between the Earth and the Moon, or even between places where time passes at different rates very easy to understand, while also saving ourselves the monumental expense and effort of sending a spaceship to the moon or to a black-hole while we bounce messages around, by just spending a few Euros on a couple of ‘reel to reel’ tape decks and a few metres of magnetic tape.

Setting up the first tape loop.

Imagine setting up the following experiment. In a simple corridor, say 10 metres long.

First we mark off opposite ends of the corridor ‘Earth’ and ‘Moon’, and then we set up a couple of tables, and some comfy chairs, along with a 20 metre length of magnetic tape running from a tape machine at the Earth end to a tape machine at the Moon end and back again in a closed loop.

Now at each end we slightly modify our tape recorders in so that they both play back whatever arrives on the tape loop as it enters the machine, then wipe or erase the tape with an erase head a few centimetres further on, and then also record anything said into a microphone attached to the machine, onto the tape just as it leaves the machine.

In this way we have a system that constantly replicates on a small scale, and easy to visualise and understand way, what would happen if we were really sending and receiving messages over a great distance in outer space at the speed of light.

Not only this but such an experimental set up will also allow us to cut the power to the set up at any point so we can freeze all motion and understand what is happening at our own pace.

Getting In the tape loop.

Now our experiment is set up the fun begins and hopefully, whether you are scientifically minded or not you will see how ‘time delays’ can be ‘timeless delays’ and what it may really mean to ‘warp space’ without warping a thing called time.

With someone at the ‘Moon’ end of the corridor and us at the ‘Earth’ end we could grab the microphone and say the immortal phrase ‘Testing, testing 1,2,3’.

And of course whatever we say into the microphone goes straight onto the magnetic tape and is constantly carried away up to the moon end of the corridor at whatever speed the tape loop is running at.

Seeing the message as a real and moving ‘thing’.

We can't normally see whether sounds have been recorded on ordinary magnetic tape, but if we were able to make a special tape that looked completely normal when blank but actually showed up visually as patterns or colours any sounds that were recorded on it[2] then you would actually see that as we spoke into the microphone, patterns relating to what we said, and blank areas showing the gaps between words, would continuously appear on the tape and be and physically carried on the tape loop up the corridor.

So if we set up the speed of the tape correctly we could mimic exactly the speeds and delays found in actual Earth to Moon communications, and on recording a message at the earth end of the set up we could see its physical ‘length’ as it actually appeared on the tape and watch, or actually walk alongside, the message as it travelled the ten metres to the Moon end of the corridor!

At the Moon end the playback head on the tape machine would detect and amplify the message so we would actually hear it as, or where, it arrived.

Likewise of course. Any message someone at the ‘Moon’ end says into the microphone would make its mark, on the (freshly erased) tape loop as it passed the record head, and travel back at the same fixed pace to the mission control end of the corridor.

So far, this simple demonstration has hopefully enabled you to visualise just what it means to send messages over long distances, and you can see just what that ‘one or two second delay’ in the Apollo moon missions communications actually was, in that it was the real and physical gap between real and physically existing messages of a physical length heading out along great distances.

A critical part of this experiment as we will see is that it gives us an alternative view of what words, or messages, and delays or gaps actually are.

If we can see that the magnetic representations of our words physically recorded on audio tape are real and physical things, ‘things’ not fundamentally different from tennis balls or rocks, things that can be picked up, dropped, thrown or carried from A to B and so on.

From here we can see that ‘spoken words in air’ are admittedly far more untameable and unstable but still real and existing ‘things’, bunches of airborne pressure waves, existing and moving from A to B.

And therefore also that ‘radio messages’ are real things, bunches of carefully organised electromagnetic waves flying from A to B ‘holding in-formation’ just as surely as a flock of birds miraculously trained to cover great distances at great speeds while holding a near perfect formation.

Black-hole communication v3

Our tape loop experiment lets us see and understand the problems of communicating over a few hundred thousand km for the earth to the moon but without the added problems of significantly distorted time at different locations.

Indeed although the Moons gravity is only one sixth of the Earth’s this does not equate to a 1 to 6 time distortion, one gravitational field has to be hundreds (CHECK) of times stronger or weaker than another to produce a noticeable time distortion.

This massive difference in gravity easily occurs around black-holes, in BBB NNN explains the following scenario...

Figure: Imagine the tape deck on the left is simulating conditions near a black hole. The magnetic tape is made to compress more and more at this end. Thus messages sent from the 'flatter space' (right) end seem stretched.

In this way we can see how apparent Time dilation can all be happening at once. And how 'messages' aren't sent over time(flat or warped) but are 'things' with dimensions, that can get distorted as they head into warped space. But there is no reason to thing they get 'squashed into the past' or stretched out into the future. As long as things can just get squashed 'now' - and rates of change can get dilated 'now' Everything works out, and many 'mysteries' disappear.

If we had two spaceships out on a mission to explore a black-hole, one a support ship ‘parked’ in space a safe distance from the black-hole and the other a scout ship orbiting very close to, but not beyond the ‘point of no return’, or ‘event horizon’ of the black-hole then as the two ships radio each other with ‘daily’ progress checks and reports, the way the black-hole distorts space and time around it would produce some very surprising results.

Results that at first seem to be conclusive proof not only that time exists but also that it can be stretched and warped in ways that might even make time travel possible!

So let’s examine this scenario and see whether it defeats the idea of timelessness or whether timelessness can actually clarify what may be happening.

Let's say that before our heroic explorer sets off to venture near the strong gravitational field we have an agreement that we, on the control ship will send out daily time and date stamped reports to him every 24 hours, and likewise we will expect regular ‘once every 24 hours’ replies from the explorer.

The explorer confidently sets out but (ass nnn explains) it transpires that according to general relativity things would get very confusing as the journey progresses and people try to stay in touch, this is because the theory of relativity dictates that Time is slowed down by gravity, so our explorer heading towards the BH, and therefore in a field of very strong gravity will experience a much slower passing of Time than us on the more distant support ship.

Note however that neither crew would directly notice this, in fact everything would seem just fine on the support ship and just fine on the explorer but it might appear to each, that the other ship was behaving oddly.

If the support ship was floating a few million of billion km from the explorer as it started sending messages every 24 hours the crew may at first not be too surprised that they weren’t getting back immediate responses to each message, because as even the short Apollo trips to the Earth’s moon showed us we should expect delays when sending radio messages over hundreds of thousands, let alone many millions of km.

Speeded up or slowed down?

However the support crew might be surprised that when they eventually started receiving back messages from the explorer the messages arrived not once a day as agreed but once every two days.

The support group might be even more surprised to find the reports they were getting back sounded as if they were being played at half speed, and that the reports revealed that everything was normal on the explorer ship, but that the crew wanted to know why the support ship was sending two ‘speeded up’ messages every day, each with incorrect time stamps!

This confusion reveals the effects of the warping of space and time, because as the explorer vessel gets closer to the BH it is entering an area of very high gravity and this means that compared to the distant support ship it is entering an area of in a sense highly compressed space, and heavily dilated or slowed down time, but to its crew onboard everything seems normal.

So from the explorer’s point of view messages seem to be arriving more often that agreed, and sound speeded up like messages from chipmunk control!

When the explorer crew notice they are getting unexpected messages they report this by sending out a few messages, at a rate of just one message a day, at 12 o’clock by the ships reckoning as agreed.

But the messages being sent from the explorer ship, in its field of high gravity and slowed time, arrive at the base ship billions of km away less than once a day and sounding slowed down.

If we imagine leaving the two ships in their locations for a whole year surely there would be such massive confusion and disagreement about times and dates that it would prove time, and some kind of time distortion was clearly happening, and while this is one thing to talk about messages flying around, what is happening to the actual people onboard the explorer ship? if they are sinking into the past or living in slow motion can we ever pull them back? What age would they be? And if we stood side by side would we be able to communicate face to face or would there still be a time difference physically existing in the space between us?

Untangling the time loop.

All of this seems at first to be impossible, for starters how could one ship be receiving reports faster than they are being transmitted?

Does this mean extra reports were being mysteriously created by aliens and snuck into the system?

How can messages sent once a day only arrive every two days, in a worst case scenario if everyone stays where they are, experiencing time flowing at vastly different rates isn’t one group, or at least their spaceship, going to actually see the end of the universe while the other group is only halfway through history?

The plot thickens more when we find our explorers have given up on the experiment and leave the dense gravity around the black-hole to return to mission control for a serious chat about what went wrong.

When we dock the ships and open the air lock we are all surprised to find that according to their appearance and their own super accurate digital calendar clocks they have actually aged significantly fewer days than we on mission control have.

All of these conclusions, based on the highly accurate and extremely well tested theories of relativity might seem at first almost impossible to easily understand also seem to be very definite proof that relativity is fundamentally correct when it says time can be distorted, and therefore this example is indisputable proof that Time exists.

But both relativity and timelessness can survive side by side here if instead of seeing events as ‘happening over time’ we see events as ‘just happening’, and just happening in space that may be distorted and at ‘rates’ that may vary from place to place.

If this sounds like just a reworded definition of ‘time distortion’ remember that the theory of ‘time’ insists on the existence of the unseen past and future, and insists that ‘time’ itself is a thing that flows in one direction between these ‘places’, while the observations of timelessness call only for things to exist, move, change and interact, in the present, whether It is warped in a spatial sense or not.

I can clarify what I mean here if we modify our Earth to Moon tape loop model to emulate communications between a base ship and an explorer near a black-hole.

Tape loop with warped space.

The basic tape loop experiment lets us visualise the fairly simple situation where there were constant speeds of communication, in flat space, and therefore simple gaps or delays when communicating over great, but ‘simple’

So these are situations where there were no noticeable ‘time dilation’ problems, let alone people disagreeing about what actual hour or even what day it might be.

But to emulate the problems we might see when communicating with astronauts near a black-hole all we have to do is consider just how things would seem in our corridor if we could stretch or compress our magnetic tape !!!

Tape loop next stage. XXXDUPLICATION here merging of rewrites ..recheck

Hopefully the ‘tape loop’ model of communication between the Earth and the moon has allowed you to grasp the idea of seeing how a ‘message’ or ‘word’ can quiet literally be seen as a real and physically existing ‘object’ or ‘thing’.

The idea of a single ‘word’ existing as a ‘thing’, in the form of a vast collection of completely intangible and incredibly fast moving radio waves zipping through the air or through the vacuum of space might be rather unintuitive to our minds but whenever you simply ‘speak a word’ into a Mobil phone that is precisely what you are creating.

And each Time you hear a word that is received by your phone one of these seemingly intangible ‘collection of flying radio waves’ has been grabbed by your phones aerial and digitally reconstituted to let you hear the information that it ‘is’ or ‘consists of’.

Using the tape loop model to show ‘words’ as objects also paves the way for us to not only understand some key concepts about Einstein's theory of relativity, but to see how they can be grasped and understood without using the concept of time, but just imagining ‘things’ existing, moving and travelling between locations – at different rates while also being ‘distorted’ in different ways as they do so.

To demonstrate time dilation without time the first modification to our experiment is to walk down the corridor and take down the sign saying ‘Moon’, and replacing it with one saying ‘Black-hole’.

The next modification is to replace the original magnetic tape with a loop of stretchable or elastic magnetic tape, and to add a set of rollers or some other mechanism in-between the two ends of the corridor such that the tape entering and leaving the tape machine at the Earth end of the corridor is significantly stretched compared to the tape as it enters and leaves the machine at the far end representing somewhere close to (but not actually in) a ‘Black-hole’.

Stretchable tape explained.

In general use the last thing you want from tape is that it stretches because any such deformation will cause sounds played back to be s–l-o-w-e-d d-o-w-n along with a drop in pitch in a way that makes listening to music and speech rather irritating.

But in this experiment we really want that ability, so one way or another we reset our tape loop so that a one centimetre length of tape at the ‘black-hole’ end of the corridor is smoothly stretched out to a full 10 centimetres as it reaches the ‘Earth’ bound tape machine. (CHANGE to 10 = 5, ½ for clarity?)

Likewise of course as that part of tape loops back round past the machines play and record heads and is heading back to the ‘black-hole’ end it is set up so that a 10 centimetre length of tape smoothly returns, or un-stretches, back in length to just one centimetre.

The practical problems in actually making and arranging magnetic tape, tape spools, pinch rollers and so on, so that it would meet these requirements are not the issue here, and we could cheat and mimic the set up with a computer quiet easily, but that would add a layer of abstract complexity just at the point where we are trying to make an already abstract point visible and tangible, so all that matters here is that we visualise our modified tape loop

Tape running, and A-----c----t---I--o-n.

Now all we have to do is forget everything you know think you know or are worried you will never know about ‘relativity’ and imagine this modified tape loop running and some very interesting results become apparent.

If as a preliminary check we set up a metronome ticking every ten seconds near the microphone at the Earth end this would result in a stream of clicks being recorded on the tape as it passes the Earth bound tape machine recording head.

If, as in the previous experiment, any sound recorded on the tape also left some visual mark, on the tape then we would actually see that as the clicks are recorded on the tape and start heading towards the other end of the corridor the discoloured, recorded clicks, show up as clear marks very conveniently 10 centimetres apart.

But we also know we have set up the tape to be stretched by a factor of 1 to 10 from one end of the corridor to the other, so as these blips 10 centimetres apart appear at the Earth end and head towards the black-hole end we could again physically walk alongside them on their journey, but in this case also watch each 10 centimetre gap as it smoothly closed down so it was only a one centimetre gap just as it reached the ‘black-hole’ Tape machine.

At the black-hole end.

Now the usefulness of this thought experiment is that there is no rush to understand what is happening as it runs. Not much is going on; all that’s happening in fact is that …

-the tape is running continuously, and it is smoothly shrinking in length as it leaves ‘Earth’ and heads for the BH, and re-stretching on its way back,

-and the metronome is pouring and endless stream of clicks 10 seconds, or 10 centimetres apart on to the tape at the earth end.

But now of course now as this tape is played back at the ‘compressed’ black-hole end we don’t hear a regular stream of clicks each 10 seconds apart, but instead an regular stream of clicks just one second apart !.

The reason for the exclamation mark here is because intuition tells us this can be quite right, it seems impossible that we can we be producing one click every 10 seconds ‘on earth’ but hearing one per second at the black-hole end.

But at the same Time, just by looking at the marks on the tape where the clicks actually are we can clearly see that this would be the case !

This seems impossible because it is as if we were filling a bucket up at one rate and emptying ten times faster but the bucket was never getting fuller or emptier.

Or to put it a more appetising way, how would you like a wallet that you could put a dollar into every 10 seconds… while taking a dollar out every single second?

Where are these extra ‘9’ dollars or clicks constantly coming from?

The answer sadly is that the clicks at the black-hole end are actually smaller, this is to say not only are they 10 times closer together but at that end they would also be physically 10 times shorter on the tape, and make a clicking sound 10 times shorter when played.

Sending messages from the black-hole.

We can see that if someone based at the black-hole end of the experiment starts speaking, or just recording regularly spaced clicks on the tape, these recordings made on tape that is un-stretched, will of course be stretched out, along with the gaps between them as the tape travels to the Earth end tape machine.

And here again we can see how there might at first seem to be a problem, clicks being created in the ‘compressed space’ and slowed time at the black-hole end but being stretched out and played slowly at the other should lead to a build up of clicks, like a tail back of traffic at a toll gate.

But knowing that the length of tape is always just a finite thing connecting one place to another we know this cannot happen and the changing speed of the tape as it goes from being squashed to stretched means things will always have to add up perfectly[3].

In our corridor experiment we have a kind of ‘Gods eye view’ of events because we personally don’t change size or change the rate at which we function as we walk up or down the corridor

In a real space exploration situation any astronauts moving from the earth location to the black-hole location would become gradually ‘compressed’ as they moved down to see how things were at the black-hole location and things would seem normal to them at every part of the journey.

If in our earth based corridor experiment we actually also shrunk in size the further we moved down the corridor then to us the visible marks on the magnetic tape showing where the metronome clicks were, and the gaps between them, would not get smaller relative to us, and any metronome we carried with us would also be getting smaller, and tick faster accordingly.

In this way as we arrived at the black-hole end of the corridor the visual gaps would seem unchanged, and the audible clicks we heard from the tape player would match our own metronome.

We couldn’t shrink everyone and everything at the black-hole end, but if we did make a smaller, faster metronome, and a even a smaller tape player things would line up perfectly at that end, the ticks playing from the tap would match the ticks on the shrunken metronome.

We could also run or stop the experiment, look at it from half way along the corridor with our Gods eye view, and even walk all around it, and see how it makes sense that although in different places, different things are happening at different rates, and even how these rates are smoothly changing even by a factor of ten, for the same single object (the tape, or a message) from one place to another, over different parts of ‘itself’, this can still happen without time and it still makes sense to see everything as just happening ‘now’.

(i.e. without calling on the existence, flow and distortion of an invisible fourth dimensional ‘thing’)

(webnote - assuming the ship near the black hole is a sealed vessel, then in effect all the messages they never send out, or away from the black hole area are 'in' the ship. The crew may be inspired by the images they see through the windows, but the energy that 'is' the messages is just energy held in the ship, released while they press the transmit button. What I'm pointing to here is that there is no 'time based store of messages' accumulating or held on the ship - only ever a physical store of matter and/or messages).

There is no ‘where’ else to store events.

To anyone who really understands the ins and outs of relativity so far this thought experiment may not have seemed to reveal anything new, but now consider the fact that with the simple tape loop model we can turn it off and restart it as many times as we choose.

If we do stop the loop we can walk around the setup and see the location, length, and size of every bit of information, or ‘event’ in the system. What is more we can turn the power back on whenever we want and the system will carry on as if nothing had happened.

The ability to stop and restart the experiment eliminates the element of time from the situation we are considering, and shows us how everything can be explained in terms of things just existing and moving, perhaps in unusual and physically distorted ways, but not having to exist and move through ‘time’ or be distorted by ‘distorted time’.

What this means is that in our experiment, facts, details, events, locations and so on are physically stored in real matter and real locations that can be seen and touched, and yet the simple mechanical system reproduces the apparently ‘time related’ problems and anomalies found when communicating to and from black-holes.

What is more we can see how the system can run constantly without any kind of ‘accumulative problem’ i.e. if we leave it running constantly no bit of tape is getting more and more stretched or compressed, no build up of ‘clicks’ are getting squashed tighter and tighter into a small area approaching infinity and so on.

There may seem to be an ignored detail her in that our tape machines wipe the tape after they have played the rapidly arriving clicks, and perhaps in reality this would equate to a build up of ‘the constantly growing record that is the temporal past’, and that this is not modelled here.

But if you reconsider you may see that although we have the idea, or assign the property to the temporal past that it ‘is an ever accumulating record of all events that happen anywhere’, you may see that this is just an idea, a guess, taken to be true but it has never to my knowledge been proven in any text or experiment to be true.

And what is worse it seems to be taken as true based on the very unscientific ‘reasoning’ that ‘if time exists, and it has an invisible past, then that’s what the past probably is’.

What I'm saying here is that you can go around making up specifications for unproven, invisible things if you want, but don’t be too surprised if reality doesn’t match your imagination.(and you end up thinking you are being confused by a ‘truly’ mysterious thing, that ‘does exist’ but is just completely undetectable).

In the timeless view it is assumed that information, records or effects of any events, can only be stored in physical matter that exists here and now.

And it is suggested that looking at that matter, around us, tree growth rings etc and within us, personal memories etc, can lead us to believe that there may be some other thing going on, and some third ‘record’ of all events created and stored. But on close inspection there is seen to be no real reason to suppose this, no proof of it, and no need for it to exist for the universe to function as we constantly see that it does.

We also note that in a sense all the matter in the universe is constantly ‘employed’ in storing information anyway, (see explanation elsewhere) so the problem is not that this experiment, or even the reality around a black-hole, can't explain or store some over rapidly accumulating version of the past, the problem is that we have come up with the unsubstantiated idea that it should.

(i.e. just as some explanation may not match our expectation as to what some ‘magic trick’ was the error is not in the explanation failing to satisfy, but in our expectation being invalid.)

Black-hole communication summary.

So if we imagine a fellow researcher sent down to the far end to check the apparatus is working and told to expect one click every 10 seconds, we can see why he or she might be confused and come back up the corridor reporting the problem. Or similar to our fictitious astronaut the researcher might report the problem into the microphone at the black-hole end of the set up. If they did this then a simple message like ‘there’s a problem’ which might take a couple of seconds to say, and take up 2 centimetres of tape at that end, would get stretched out tenfold as it reached our tape player and sound to us as if there was a problem with the researcher/astronauts speech, or version of Time.

NOTE ALSO – the delay before the first clicks arrive is very significant, we don’t just start sending clicks 1 per 10 seconds at the Earth end and immediately receive compressed clicks at the BH end, there has to be a length of tape, that seems to be 10 metres but is in fact 5 – or 20 metres – check, i.e. for the compression to take place over,

The reason this experiment is important …CHECK ONFROM HERE

Is because like the simpler tape loop demonstrating the delays or gaps in communicating from Earth to the moon this experiment with stretched tape at first seems to demonstrate complicated issues involving Time, and in this case how Time can seem to exist, and can seem to flow, and be compressed or stretched.

But in fact the entire experiment can be explained entirely in terms of ‘objects’ travelling through stretched or compressed ‘space’, and so themselves being stretched or compressed, slowed down and sped up.

And the redundancy of time can be demonstrated because nothing in the experiment that seems to replicate time, actually needs time. The tape loop can be switched off, examined carefully and switched back on without any messages or transmissions being lost.

There is a difference here between massages on tape, and messages in air or in the form of radio waves and this is that air born messages (sounds) and radio messages must keep moving due to their nature, and it for this reason and this reason only that a full sized version of the experiment using sound or radio could not be stopped and restarted.

But one should be very careful here not to slip into the ‘witch hunt’ habit of thinking that ‘every single observation, automatically by default, counts as proof that time exists’ (XXX re express better).

In other words, the fact that ‘sound or radio waves, by nature have to move’, does not also constitute a proof that there is an invisible intangible fourth dimension inhabited by a thing called ‘time’ with a constantly created and accumulating perfectly detailed past, a future, a one way flow, and that may be travelled through etc, etc, etc.

The key point to get here is that the compressed tape at the black-hole end can represent how ’space’, objects[4] and even rates of change can intricately affected by the super powerful gravity near a black-hole, but also how all of this can just be happening ‘now’ everywhere.

And how that all the ‘information’ in the universe always just simply exists physically somewhere and no matter how distorted different things might seem to be from one point of view or other, this doesn’t prove or need the existence of a fourth dimension to be explained.

And any information does not have to exist or change ‘over time’, but need only just exist and change in a place, or over a distance in the case of transmitted messages.

So what this experiment shows, is how even the more complex parts of relativity, involving gravitational Time distortion can be explained in terms of

• Objects or ‘messages’,

• Existing all at once,

• But travelling from A to B through stretched or compressed space.

In a real life situation, given that it is accepted that an astronaut residing near a black-hole might experience things changing half as quickly as a support group in a more distant ship, this might still seem like we have found some advantage in life, some short cut, or even some form of ‘time travel’ no matter how I try to explain it away.

So using this black-hole phenomena perhaps some high school beauty queen could leave school and live in the ‘slower’ space near a black-hole at great expense but with the pay off that she could keep turning up at the school reunions every 10 years while only ever looking a year older !

This is in theory quite possible, but the pay off isn’t quite what it seems. If this were to happen and instead of being separated by billions of km we could see the beauty queen (perhaps in some sealed off but transparent chamber) and her jealous school mates simultaneously we would as in the corridor tape loop experiment see that everything is always just happening.

Side by side, how things would look would depend on your own point of view.

If you were with the class mates, the beauty queen would be seen to be living and moving at one tenth normal speed, and yes she would be keeping her looks as a result. But you and they could watch ten films, have ten meals, go to ten parties, read ten books etc while she could only have fun and improve herself at one tenth that speed.

If you wandered into the special chamber things would again seem normal where you were and you could talk to her perfectly normally but her class mates outside would seem to be running around at ten times normal speed burning up their lives ‘as if there was no tomorrow’ :^)

If we could set up a machine so that the ‘rate’ difference between the beauty queen trying to change slowly, and her classmates varied smoothly from one end of a corridor to the other at the venue of the next school reunion things would be very interesting.

Then if you gate crashed the party, wherever you stood things would always seem to be moving at normal rates, while others around you would seem to move oddly, and any ‘clocks’ or ‘watches’ they had would seem to move faster or slower to your own ‘correctly functioning’ watch depending on where in the corridor they were.

So if we could set this up in a ‘corridor’ you could perhaps stand half way along and to your left would be the beauty queen seeming to move particularly slowly, while simultaneously to the right her school mates would seem to be moving very quickly.

But all of this would just be constantly happening, and there would never be a problem with events or history or events ‘piling up’ anywhere, and there would never be a problem with conversation, dancing with other guests or more importantly ‘causality’ or ‘time travel’ or rather ‘rate distortion’ paradoxes

Because although the rates at which different people moved varied with their locations, if you wandered over to someone or as they wandered over to you, your ‘rates’ would be smoothly changing and you would always by definition, both end up in the same place together and therefore be running at the same speed!

This rate difference could also vary across your own body, and you could even be holding a partners hand while you chatted to a slightly speeded up person in front of you and they chatted to a slowed down person behind.

So in the same way, as the crew in our ship close to the black-hole leave the area and fly back to the distant mother ship to discuss the way they seem to be moving, and ‘aging’ at different speeds to each other, all problems with different rates would be ironed out as they both inevitable ended up together, in the same place, and thus the same distance from the black-hole and experience the same ‘time dilation’. So in this way, no matter how fast, or sneakily one crew tried to meet up with the other they would never be able to make the time, or rate difference clear and visible across a single room, or between two people as they shook hands, one moving and changing at half the speed of the other.

[1] The gap does not equate directly here because mission control messages are always just flying out into space as are the astronauts transmissions, but hopefully you will see the reason for this analogy shortly.

[2] Using a very different method celluloid movie film actually does have the audio soundtrack recorded visually right next to the frames of film as a continuous image that looks similar to the wave form you might see on a computer sound editing program.

[3] NOTE TO EDITOR, I may have got my tape loops in a twist here as far as how it would be precisely as the messages are recorded, squashed, sound, and are played back, but the analogy should still hold when ironed out.

[4] Whether you see them as sounds, messages, physical things like people or spaceships, or even as being ‘records of events’.

(add 'no over lap of 'apparently' past+future msgs + add luna module+ earth pics)