Reply to post: Re: Minor things....

You wait ages for a neutron star and black hole to collide, then two pairs come along at once

Anonymous Coward
Boffin

Re: Minor things....

Hello anonymous crank. Answers to two of the less mad bits in case anyone else is reading.

Information does indeed not pass outwards through an event horizon (in classical GR), and that includes gravitational waves. Gravitational waves from collision events originate instead in the deformations of spacetime outside any event horizon.

And your point about defining a straight line is related to the equivalence principle and in turn to the nature of manifolds which are always 'locally flat' (you need a formal definition of 'local' here which I'm not going to give). Informally, if you have only a single 'straight line' (geodesic) there's not much you can say: you need more than one. For example if you have a pair of straight lines and you observe that they meet at more than one point then you can immediately infer that the spacetime through which they travelled has curvature. And that's exactly what we observe of course: it's gravitational lensing. Where we observe multiple images of a single object, there are families of null geodesics which meet both at the object and in our telescopes.

I'm not sure if there a gravitationally-lensed objects which are visible to the naked eye: it would be very cool if there are.

The rest of your comment is, sadly, just the incoherent mumbling of someone who completely fails to understand what they think they understand. There's a term for that.

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