Reply to post: Re: In Real Time?

Black hole destroys corona

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

Re: In Real Time?

The things people explore with BECs are analogues of black holes: they are not actually black holes. In particular the things that are trapped in such objects are phonons – quanta of sound, not light. BECs are useful for these analogue models because they are very nearly perfect fluids and the speed of sound in them is tiny.

None of this has anything to do with the constancy of the speed of light. There is no evidence that the speed of light is not constant in an inertial frame. Indeed, since general relativity treats the speed of light essentially as a problem in our choice of units (we should have used seconds for everything, or metres for everything) then demonstrating that the speed of light varies would mean falsify GR (and in fact special relativity with it). Lots of people, me included, would love to do that, but these theories keep passing tests.

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