Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

ieatdirt44 t1_izam4bn wrote

I've seen many depictions of black holes looking like a funnel, a heavy object on a trapoline or studied using water to create a vortex. All the depictions make it seem as if the event horizon is on a singular plane. How accurate could this be for actual black holes? I picture in my head, a central point or singularly being in one static position while the space around it is warped from every possible direction creating infinite vortices all being "stretched" (down?) Towards the singularity.

I guess my question is: Do we need to think in higher dimensions to be able to understand black holes and is it feasible that humans will ever one day be capable of imagining and comprehending anything but the 3 spacial dimensions we've been adapted to believe?

1

opiateopiate t1_izbo520 wrote

Those depictions offer an analogy for how massive objects warp spacetime that's easier for us to picture than the reality, which is a four-dimensional manifold being squeezed, stretched, and warped by those objects' gravity. A sheet of fabric is two-dimensional, so showing it "stretched" into a third dimension demonstrates gravity's action. You're right in thinking that we would have to be able to think in five-dimensional terms to envision the action of gravity on spacetime in a similar way, since spacetime is four-dimensional.

Humans as a whole probably won't get better at getting intuitive feels for high-dimensional spaces and manifolds. 3D is "baked in" to our perception of the world and our internal model of how it works and how to move through it. Mathematicians often do get slightly more of an intuitive sense from working with them long enough.

4