Do you think that (if you believe in a soul or not,
because come on I'm being hypothetical here)
a soul could out run a black hole?
For instance, someone dies as they are crushed by the infinite gravity of a black hole, could a soul possibly escape?
What properties would something like that need
in order to do it?
Physicists and/or physics buffs please comment. :-)
I only have an elementary knowledge of physics,
but I enjoy the basic theories that I know. (I've
seen what the bleep do we know?!? and read a
few books, like I said, I'm no scholar lol)
Thanks for your replies!
You are a ghost pushing a skeleton wrapped in a meat-bag of mostly water on top of a molten ball of iron covered in a thin crust of rock supporting a film of interesting chemistry. Your existence is not even a blip on the radar of your home planet much less the rest of the universe. That is terrifying. You are a living creature who will be born, live and die. That means that you have a very short, (in the west mostly predefined) time of existence to make a mark on your family, community, and world. The connections you make with other creatures can change whole nations. One man standing alone is cannon fodder; 30 men standing together on the right fulcrum at the right time can bend the moral path of the entire human race. You will live forever in the thoughts of the people you help, you raise and lift up to be better than when you found them. That is a bit less terrifying. The problem I have with believing in immortality and an afterlife is that it encourages you to do nothing now, in the one existence we can prove exists. I've known people who have not fought bill collectors, or evictions etc because it was "god's plan" for them to live a shitty life. Most religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, teach suffering as a virtue, that living in squalor and filth is something noble almost. Blessed are the poor and meek and that nonsense. The thing that finally drove me away from faith and religion is that those same books and moral teaching also tell you that doing good works, feeding the poor, treating the sick etc are the paths to salvation. People in the churches I grew up in were so worried about what comes after, and how they were going to be judged that they forgot to, you know, live now and make a life for themselves and their families. I say that to get into a discussion on souls: Does a soul exist? And my answer to that is yes, it does... in a fashion. Your brain is a massive electrical interconnected network of chemical signals in a ball of fat and gristle. Damage that ball of fat enough and you can get a massive change in your personality, likes and dislikes etc. Take that same brain and raise it differently from birth and you get a whole different person as an adult. This set of physical interconnects in your head, formed by your birth and upbringing is a physical thing that can be measured, recorded... and altered if we so choose. Because it is a physical thing, it exists. We call this the 'soul.' So does this mean we are just animals and we can do whatever we want to do? No. Something is different in our heads than say crows, or cattle, etc. But we are awfully close to chimps and the greater apes than most of us want to admit. At what point does the brain and its network cease to be just a brain and then become a nexus of thought? Dogs are smart, do they have souls? Well, sort of. Their brains work the same way yours does: it has neurons, a frontal cortex, brain stem, spinal column binocular vision etc. By the physical definition of what I call a 'soul' dogs have souls. So do mice, rats, goats, lizards, alligators, etc. The word 'soul' in the common context does not apply to those creatures because we humans are a narcissistic lot and want to think we are special, so what we commonly call a 'soul' is reserved for us, and us alone. That brings up another question, doesn't it: What makes us different? Is it language? Art? Poetry? Weapons? Reality TV shows? The physical answer is that we have a big frontal cortex, wrapped around an ape brain, wrapped around a primitive mammalian brain, covering a reptilian brain sitting on a tiny little regulatory chunk of brain left over from when we swam in the oceans a few hundred million years ago. Somewhere, sometime, about 50,000 years ago the number of neurons and brain pathways in our heads got high enough that we became sentient and could do things like remember hunting patters, draw pictures to remember things, and most importantly, pass data along to a new generation. There is even a name for it: The Great Leap Forward So because we are physical beings with physical bodies and a brain based in physics and chemistry, we can now ask and answer your question. We know quite a bit about black holes, up to the point of the event horizon. At this point, nothing comes out to give us data to analyze. But we do know what happens a few meters away from that point, and it is not pleasant to things made of physical stuff. The energy in the magnetic fields would rip your body apart into its component atoms, the hyper radiation would vaporize anything left, and you would be long long gone before that happened, even if you flew right at the heart of the beast at a hyper velocity.
I'm on the phone at the moment, so this is gonna be painfully short and to the point, but let's assume there is a next life. Your time in the womb is a blip in time compared to the life you live, but the time spent there developing the faculties needed to navigate this world was crucial. If the next world exists, our time here will be a similar blip, of similar crucial experience, to develop the spiritual faculties needed for the next life. Just like a fetus could not even begin to comprehend what comes next, we likewise cannot comprehend what comes next after we die. Afterlife or not, let's not worry too much about it. It's more important to focus on the here and now, enjoying this life and being good people. It's more important than worrying about something that may or may not be.
There's a bit of woo about nuclear bombs destroying the soul because something or other. I don't know where it came from, but Google finds a few discussions if you want to venture down that rabbit hole. Warren Ellis did a funny, if very very 90s, riff on it.
HA! That was pretty funny. I probably will check into that.
This is all steering sorta in the direction I had hoped. I was going to ask about dark matter actually. And super-position/uncertainty principles.
A soul, if they exist, are not physical. They would not be effected by any known force in the world, otherwise we could detect them. In this case, they could escape from the black hole, unless there is a soul-version of such a thing in the same place that does the same thing.
Why is your post formatted so oddly? Lines end seemingly at random! To answer your question: I'm not convinced souls actually exist, but if they do, I don't see why a physical property should have any influence on a metaphysical object. It's right there in the etymology of the word 'metaphysical'.
For the simple purpose of randomness. But, say that a soul is some form of energy. Light can't escape a black hole and we can see it. We cannot see a soul...but I suppose we also cannot see the various color fields that [butterflies]( http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/butterfly-has-extreme-color-vision) allegedly see. Hmm...but I do see your point. I cannot prove a soul is real or tangible and only death will let anyone subjectively know.
This is not technically accurate, and what follows may seem like semantics but it is important physics so hang on a moment. We cannot and have not seen a black hole. We HAVE seen the effects of the existence of these objects, we have watched stars orbit these objects, we can measure their mass, and we can watch them eat stars and gas clouds. What we CAN see is what is now known as the event horizon. 1 mm on this side of the event horizon, we can get data and light can, theoretically, escape to get to our eyes and instruments. At the exact point of that horizon, the universe divides by zero and our current understanding of reality breaks down. We have images of the chaos created by such deep gravity wells, but no images of the event horizon proper that I am aware of. The recent Japanese XRAY observatory, Hitomi, sadly had a malfunction, but one of the things it was supposed to do is increase the resolution of the images we have of the center of our galaxy. The James Webb telescope looks at the wrong kind of light, so we have to wait for another big XRAY scope to get better images. The other thing I want to point at, also a technical reply is this: Nor can anyone else. We can take an image of the electron shell of a hydrogen atom for example. We can now image individual photons of light energy. We can measure the temperature difference of the equator and poles of Pluto. You get the idea, I hope. If the soul was real, and existed within the laws of reality, we would have found it by now. Hell, they are using brain scans to pull dreams and individual memories out of people. Whatever it is that makes human different than the other higher life forms on earth is not something supernatural. But something is different about us where we can speak, build, dream and ponder. I don't think it is a 'soul.' And in my mind that is something that makes us even more special and that we should spread sentient though through the universe and protect it. Light can't escape a black hole and we can see it.
I cannot prove a soul is real or tangible