DiamondGeezer said:
Er, even a freely falling particle can ascertain that it is accelerating, even if it feels no net forces, by measuring tidal acceleration - a trick which won't work "inside" a black hole.
Tidal effects are irrelevant to what is being discussed here. The same things happen near the apparent horizon of the Rindler rocket, where there are no tidal effects. Tidal effects are relevant only to extended bodies, and here we are talking about a single particle. In relativity when we refer to acceleration without further qualification we usually mean "proper acceleration" i.e. acceleration measured by a comoving freefalling locally-inertial observer (the rate of change of "physical speed" with respect to proper time) or as measured by an acclerometer. Therefore by definition any freefalling particle's proper acceleration is zero. Any other type of acceleration is coordinate acceleration, and depends on your choice of coordinates and is therefore not "physical" in the sense we have been using that word.
Also your assertion that you can't measure tidal forces inside the event horizon is wrong; on the contrary, the tidal forces get ever stronger the further you fall in.
DiamondGeezer said:
DrGreg said:
DiamondGeezer said:
I do think that 4-energies are invariant.
What do you mean by that? If you'd said "4-momentum is covariant" I would have understood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_(physics)
That response doesn't help. The article never uses the term "4-energy" or "invariant" (except for the phrase "adiabatic invariants" which doesn't seem to be relevant).
I have to guess that what you really meant was "4-momentum is conserved". Conservation means something quite different from invariance. Conserved quantities don't change over time (to put it simply; or more sophisticatedly they satisfy certain differential equations). Invariant quantities take the same value when measured by different coordinate systems.
If a particle has a 4-momentum
P and an observer has a 4-velocity
U, then the particle's energy relative to the observer is [itex]g(\textbf{P},\textbf{U}) = P_\alpha U^\alpha[/itex]. The same argument used earlier in this thread to show the physical speed approaches
c (as the height above the horizon of a hovering observer drops to zero) also shows that the energy, as given by this formula, diverges to infinity. That isn't because the 4-momentum becomes infinite, it's because of the change in
U. In 4D-geometrical terms it's because of the "change in angle" between
P and
U.
The 4-momentum of a free-falling particle is constant (free falling means no external force, and force is rate of change of momentum). ("Constant" means the covariant derivative along the worldline is zero.) If you choose a family of
Us approaching the speed of light (relative to some single inertial observer), then [itex]P_\alpha U^\alpha[/itex] will diverge to infinity even though
P remains constant. The 4-momentum of the falling particle never changes but the 4-velocities of each of the local hovering observers are enormously different as you get very close to the horizon.
DiamondGeezer said:
By the way, have you spotted why the fudge of using two different metrics inside and outside the event horizon is incorrect? Because the square root of a negative number [itex]\neq[/itex] minus the square root of a positive number. They might meet at zero, but they are strangers after that.
The metric equation
ds2 = ... is, in effect, a differential equation to be solved. There are two solutions, one valid only strictly outside the horizon, the other valid only strictly inside the horizon. The metric equation doesn't even make sense exactly on the horizon.
This is best understood through the analogous Rindler example; the same method applies in both cases. The Rindler example (see my earlier posts) gives explicit formulas for converting between each of the several local (
T,
R) coordinates and the single global Minkowski (
t,
x) coordinates. The formulas are different inside and outside the horizon, but the same metric equation applies to all of the different (
T,
R) coordinate systems.
I'm not sure why you think someone is implying that [itex]\sqrt{-x} = -\sqrt{x}[/itex], which obviously isn't true; you'll have to provide an explicit quote to where you think that's happening.