Comment by quantadev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quantadev | Hacker News Reader

In black holes we have essentially a "loss of a dimension" (it's a much bigger story to explain what that even means, that I won't attempt here), so it might be the case that the three-quark arrangement known as 'baryons' only forms according to number of space dimensions (3D == 3 Quarks), making baryons only happen in 3D, so that when stuff reaches an event horizon, the quarks rip apart and rearrange into something where there's simply no such thing as a baryon (i.e. in 2D space). I'm someone who thinks the 'surface' of an event horizon is where the laws are preserved, and that the singularity or even perhaps the entire interior inside black holes may simply not exist at all.

Much of where Relativity "breaks" spacetime (i.e. problems with infinities and divide-by-zero) can be solved by looking at things as a loss of a dimension. For example, length contraction is compressing out a dimension (at light speed), and also time dilation (at event horizons, or light speed) is a removal of a dimension as well. Yes, this is similar to Holographic Principle, if you're noticing that. In my view even Lorentz equation itself is an expression of how you can smoothly transform an N-Dimensional space down to an (N-1)-Dimensional space, which happens on an exponential-like curve where the asymptote is reached right when the dimension is "lost". I think "time" always seems like a special dimension, no matter what dimensionality you're in, because it's the 'next one up' or 'next one down' in this hierarchy of dimensionality in spaces. This is the exact reason 'time' in the Minkowski Space distance formula must be assigned the opposite sign (+/-) from the other dimensions, and holds true regardless of whether you assume time to be positive v.s. negative (i.e. called Metric Signature). This of course implies our entire 4D universe is itself a space embedded in a larger space, and technically it's also an "event horizon" from the perspective of higher dimensions.

> I'm someone who thinks the 'surface' of an event horizon is where the laws are preserved,

I don't think this is a good way to think it. If black hole is big enough, there is nothing strange happening in the event horizon, no significant length contraction, nothing.

Some "infinities" of singularity are at the center sure, but all the maximal Relativistic effects are at the EH surface. It's even proven that the entropy (informational content roughly) is equal to the EH area divided by the number of planc-length square areas, as the amount of quantum arrangements of information that are allowed "inside". That is a HUGE hint everything's remaining on the surface.

For example, when you see a clock fall into a BH you see it stop ticking at the EH, not at the center. It's a common misconception that everything about them is at the center, but everything interesting is at the surface.

I think you misunderstand what Holographic principle says.

Even if all information is encoded in two-dimensional surface that forms the Bekenstein bound, that does not mean that anything changes when you cross the area. It only means that radiation which black holes emit can't emit information of the matter it has absorbed.

If Event Horizons can come in any number of dimensions (with the conventional things we call Black Holes having 2D of space-like degrees of freedom on the EH) that leads to the obvious conjecture that our 3D universe might itself be a 'manifold' (projection) from a higher dimensional 4D space (i.e. we live on a 3D EH). That 4D space might even itself be a projection from a 5D one, and so on. This is extremely similar to Holographic Principle, but very definitely a more generalized theory.

> I'm someone who thinks the 'surface' of an event horizon is where the laws are preserved, and that the singularity or even perhaps the entire interior inside black holes may simply not exist at all.

Sounds tempting, but then what happens at the transition : when a sphere of matter gets just a little bit too dense ?

It's just like the Lorentz Tranform or any other of the laws of Relativity. Things can get very massive and/or time can slow way down, but ultimately there's not a "problem" (i.e. mathematical failure requiring the theory to be extended) until the speed of light is reached, as an asymptotic limit.

But you're raising a good point that maybe Lorentz is pointing to 'non-integer dimensionality' where even enough mass crammed into a small enough space causes the "new maths" to begin to noticeably take hold. Like I said I see Lorentz as a way to transform dimensionality from N-D to (N +/- 1)D, but in a continuous and 'differentiable' way.

In super simplistic terms Lorentz is a "compression" function where one dimension of space is compressed perfectly flat, which is the mathematical equivalent of removing that dimension from the 'degrees of freedom' of the system.

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