In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.
Thanks for your perseverance :-)
Yeah, you’re right, putting it this way at least seems more satisfactory, it certainly doesn’t trigger the by-definition alarm bells. (The bit about mass and charge being conserved quantities almost says the same thing, but I think the fact that conservation laws stem from observation rather than just labeling things makes the difference.)
However, by switching the point of view to sphere integrals at infinity it sort of side-steps addressing the original question, i.e. exactly what happens at the event horizon such that masses (or charges) inside it can still maintain the field outside it in such a state that the integral at infinity doesn’t change. Basically, after switching the point of view the question should be how come those integrals are conserved, after the source of the field is hidden behind an event horizon?
(After all, it takes arbitrarily longer to pass a photon between you and something approaching an EH the closer it gets, which is sort of similar to it being thrown away to infinity the way distant objects “fall away” from the observable universe in a Big Rip, it doesn’t seem like there is a mechanism for mass and charge to be conserved in those cases.)
First, note that there are no sources of gravity or of electromagnetism inside a black hole. Contrary to popular belief, black holes, like wormholes, have no center. In fact, there is no way to tell them apart from outside.
Second, electric field lines are lines in space, not spacetime, so they are not sensitive to horizons or other causal structures.
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