It's all about the key points in the new movie so don't read it if you havent seen it!

I enjoyed reading this though since it focused on some of the more prominent points of the movie. Obviously there was some movie science in there, but its good to see that some actual SCIENCE got through!


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/05/08/ba-review-star-trek/

I didn't get how the black hole in the middle of the ship was supposed to be hurting it. I mean, yeah, you have a singularity there, but it still has nearly negligible mass, so all you'd need to do is fire up the engines and let it pass through the ship relatively harmlessly.

I don't think that would work given how quickly it expanded in size. Firing up the engines would be fruitless at that proximity because of the tremendous gravitational pull.

The point is that there wouldn't be any significant gravitational pull unless you happened to be a few nanometers from the actual singularity. There just wasn't any significant source of mass for the singularity to actually grow on. Even if the entire ship had been sucked in, which at that point it clearly hadn't that gravitational pull from that much mass would still be nearly unnoticeable even a few feet from the singularity.

The only reason a black hole can exert such a great gravitational force is that you can get closer to the entire mass. With normal objects, you can only get so close before you get inside the object itself, and then the gravitation pull doesn't grow in the same way as you approach the center of the object's mass.

But, if you approach a singularity, all of that mass is crammed into no space at all (not quite true, but close enough for what I'm trying to illustrate.) Because gravity grows according to an inverse square relationship as the distance between the two masses is allowed to approach zero, the gravitational force between the two masses also approaches infinity. If an object has volume, you can't actually get infinitely close to it's center of mass with out that inverse square relationship falling apart.

Ah. A simpler way of saying that could have been something around the lines of, jump from 3 feet and your fine, jump from 200 feet and your red squash. I get what your saying though.

Er, maybe I don't understand you're analogy, but I'm talking about force, not energy. That's determined by you're absolute position; it's not relative.


Gravitational Force = [ (Gravitational Constant) * (Mass of Object 1) * (Mass of Object 2) ] / [ The square of the distance between the two object's center's of mass ]

If that distance reaches zero, that force is obviously infinite.

OH. I though you were talking about energy in regards to velocity as a result from gravitational proximity.

I get what your saying now.