JoeFreedom
New member
How can one find a hole? Is not a hole a void? If the void has no closure, the void cannot be found. Say confuscious.
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IWantGod
Guest
If you put a hole in a piece of paper, and hold it up in the air, you have a hole but there are no walls, and now imagine no bottom. It just a void.
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BartholomewB
Guest
Yes, there are. The walls aren’t very high, but they’re there. They’re measurable. Their height is equal to the thickness of the paper.If you put a hole in a piece of paper, and hold it up in the air, you have a hole but there are no walls,
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midori
Guest
You said,
In our world, all holes have a bottom. The bottom may be miles away— like the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which is 7.6 miles deep and nine inches wide-- but in our world, all holes have a place at the bottom where they stop being holes. If you have a hole that doesn’t have a bottom, your shape is more like a vertical tube, where you go in one end, and out the other. But the void doesn’t go on forever— it’s finite due to the limitations of its walls, even if it has no bottom.
and I said,It has dimensions, just no walls and no bottom…
A hole by its nature has walls. A hole is surrounded by everything-that’s-not-a-hole.Dimensions by their nature are measurable.
In our world, all holes have a bottom. The bottom may be miles away— like the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which is 7.6 miles deep and nine inches wide-- but in our world, all holes have a place at the bottom where they stop being holes. If you have a hole that doesn’t have a bottom, your shape is more like a vertical tube, where you go in one end, and out the other. But the void doesn’t go on forever— it’s finite due to the limitations of its walls, even if it has no bottom.
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Hugh_Farey
Guest
Not all holes have a bottom. A hole in a piece of paper is defined only by the thickness of the paper. The places where it stops being a hole are the planes of the surface of the paper - is that what was meant by a ‘bottom’?
A theoretical hole in the earth could either stop before emerging the other side - in which case it would have a bottom, or go straight through, in which case it wouldn’t.
The OP asked how scientists would explain the phenomenon. This is often asked of scientists whenever anything odd happens which the first observer cannot explain, and usually triumphantly, as if they think they have discovered something unknown to physics. “How did my cat get into the larder? The doors and windows were closed, but when I went in it had eaten half my supper!” “How did the conjuror make my watch disappear? It was completely impossible!”
The first thing the scientist does is not to explain the phenomenon, but to characterise it. The more we can find out about what it actually is, the more likely we are to discover a correct interpretation.
This rather spoils IWantGod’s open-ended question, as it immediately throws the question back at him. How wide is the hole? It is circular or irregular? If you reach in, can you feel the sides? Or does your arm disappear? If it has ‘no walls’, then what happens at the surface immediately surrounding the hole - is it very thin? What happens if you dig another hole right next to it? And so on, and so on. Answers to these questions will help us come up with possible explanations.
It is sometimes entertaining to play a kind of “Twenty questions” game along these lines. A proposer suggests a scenario, and the players ask questions about it to which the answer can only be ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The difference between this and the normal version of this game is that the answer to each question is decided by the toss of a coin (heads - yes, tails - no), with the proviso that the question must genuinely be answerable by such a method, and non-contradictory to what has already been established. (Having established that the creature is a bird, for example, you can’t ask the question “Is it a mammal?”).
A theoretical hole in the earth could either stop before emerging the other side - in which case it would have a bottom, or go straight through, in which case it wouldn’t.
The OP asked how scientists would explain the phenomenon. This is often asked of scientists whenever anything odd happens which the first observer cannot explain, and usually triumphantly, as if they think they have discovered something unknown to physics. “How did my cat get into the larder? The doors and windows were closed, but when I went in it had eaten half my supper!” “How did the conjuror make my watch disappear? It was completely impossible!”
The first thing the scientist does is not to explain the phenomenon, but to characterise it. The more we can find out about what it actually is, the more likely we are to discover a correct interpretation.
This rather spoils IWantGod’s open-ended question, as it immediately throws the question back at him. How wide is the hole? It is circular or irregular? If you reach in, can you feel the sides? Or does your arm disappear? If it has ‘no walls’, then what happens at the surface immediately surrounding the hole - is it very thin? What happens if you dig another hole right next to it? And so on, and so on. Answers to these questions will help us come up with possible explanations.
It is sometimes entertaining to play a kind of “Twenty questions” game along these lines. A proposer suggests a scenario, and the players ask questions about it to which the answer can only be ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The difference between this and the normal version of this game is that the answer to each question is decided by the toss of a coin (heads - yes, tails - no), with the proviso that the question must genuinely be answerable by such a method, and non-contradictory to what has already been established. (Having established that the creature is a bird, for example, you can’t ask the question “Is it a mammal?”).
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Hugh_Farey
Guest
So, let me play such a game with myself!
The black hole in India.
Is it more than a meter across? No.
Is it regularly shaped? No.
If you reach in, can you feel the sides? Yes.
If you reach in, can you see your hand? Yes.
Are the sides solid? No.
Can you see light at the other end of the hole? No.
And so on…
Now we’ve got something much more concrete to work on!
The black hole in India.
Is it more than a meter across? No.
Is it regularly shaped? No.
If you reach in, can you feel the sides? Yes.
If you reach in, can you see your hand? Yes.
Are the sides solid? No.
Can you see light at the other end of the hole? No.
And so on…
Now we’ve got something much more concrete to work on!
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Bradskii
Guest
Are the sides liquid?
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IWantGod
Guest
Yes, it’s a mile across approximately.Is it more than a meter across?
YesIs it regularly shaped?
If by sides you mean, discernible walls that go down. No. It’s just a black void. However the sides of the hole are solid in the sense of giving resistance and give off a static discharge when touched.If you reach in, can you feel the sides?
No, your hand disappears. There is no light in the hole. An object was dropped in. 10 minutes later it shot back out in to the air. It continued to fall back in and shoot back out until it was retrieved. No damage was done to the object except it had a static discharge like the sides of the hole.If you reach in, can you see your hand? Yes.
No, there is no light at all.Can you see light at the other end of the hole?
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ZMystiCat
Guest
Scientists would probably get a camera and really long rope.
Philosophers would start making YouTube videos about it.
Philosophers would start making YouTube videos about it.
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1959
Guest
I found a black hole in my yard just last night as I was walking to my car in the dark. Almost broke my ankle!
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RandomAlias
Guest
Does the hole stay in one place or does it move around?
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Hugh_Farey
Guest
It’s beginning to look to me like an opening into ‘nothing’. ‘Nothing’ has nothing in it, not even dimensions, such that anything pushed into it must immediately reappear somewhere else. Your arm, for example, which disappears at the boundary of nothing, emerges elsewhere in the universe. Where that place is depends on the curvature of the universe, which may not be regular. As for the stone, whatever speed it was going when it disappeared would be the speed it was travelling at when emerged. It could then oscillate as described. Since your arm, and the stone, reappear undamaged, we can surmise that the other end of this ‘nothing’ is relatively benign (not the interior of a star, for example), and has some gravity (so not the vacuum of outer space either).
Of course the idea that our three dimensional universe is curved around a fourth spacial dimension (like the ‘flat’ surface of a beach ball curved around a third dimension) implies that in fact ‘nothing’ is continually all around us. Everywhere is quite literally ‘the edge of the universe’. The mystery is why we can’t access it. Your hole is the first known and studied example. I suggest lowering a 360° telescope on the end of a long rod into the hole, in the hope that its observations from the other side will tell us where it emerges.
Of course the idea that our three dimensional universe is curved around a fourth spacial dimension (like the ‘flat’ surface of a beach ball curved around a third dimension) implies that in fact ‘nothing’ is continually all around us. Everywhere is quite literally ‘the edge of the universe’. The mystery is why we can’t access it. Your hole is the first known and studied example. I suggest lowering a 360° telescope on the end of a long rod into the hole, in the hope that its observations from the other side will tell us where it emerges.
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