tuning into the Past?

[YT2095]

I`v had an idea and wondered if it`s Scientifically sound (or not), it`s a little complicated but I`ll try to explain it as well as I can.

 

1`st my Premise / assumptions:

 

1) if you throw a clock into a black hole you`ll see it fall and the seconds hand will appear to be going slower and slower and then eventually stop.

 

2) this clock will also be red shifted.

 

3) if we look at the EM spectrum you`ll see that below visible light is IR, then microwave then radio, we have instruments that can detect signals at any of these frequencies also.

 

now assuming the above is correct, I postulate that it Should be possible to use instruments to "Tune in" to the past and possibly even detect/ "watch" the formation of the black hole that`s creating this effect.

 

since the images of the events that occurred at the creation of the black hole are Kept there by it`s own gravity, would it be possible to "see" some of them by tuning in to a very low frequency to pick up these Very red shifted photons that eventually manage to escape?

[Gilded]

Hmm. What happens to information in a black hole isn't quite clear, so this is highly speculative.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

[Martin]

...

now assuming the above is correct, I postulate that it Should be possible to use instruments to "Tune in" to the past and possibly even detect/ "watch" the formation of the black hole that`s creating this effect.

...

 

I'll comment even though there's stuff about the BH event horizon and what happens around it that I've read recently that I don't fully understand.

 

First of all, it's clearly a very interesting question. Second, it's accepted that a hovering observer who drops a clock in would see the clock's time slow down as the clock approaches horizon. Photons from the clock, just before it fell in, would be redshifted more and more and would show a slo-mo clock with it's hands barely moving.

 

In a sense the last split second of the clock's history before it goes thru, that history is stored and only allowed to trickle out to us very slowly in increasing slo-mo.

 

Now I don't understand the optical effects. It might be that the image of the clock, plastered there against the event horizon, is distorted by the bending of rays, so that it might look like a Salvador Dali clock or something. I don't understand that part. It might look gradually spread out some over the horizon.

 

But there is another more serious problem, which is with the resolution. When you start trying to see stuff using longer and longer radio waves, the image quality deteriorates. Swansont might be the person to speak about this. Or someone else with direct experience with optics. My feeling is that even though it is an intriguing idea and inprinciple you should be able to see the stuff that fell into the black hole last year, there is a practical difficulty because the light reflected off the object during its last moments on the outside would by now be redshifted a jillion-fold and even if you could tune an antenna to receive it the resolution would be too lousy to extract an image from. Maybe someone else has some other angle on this.

Edited December 6, 2008 by Martin

[swansont]

Martin's right about the difficulty of imaging — you generally won't be able to get better than the wavelength of the light as the scale of the resolution.

[YT2095]

yeah, I can see what you mean, and I never considered the idea that the event horizon may not be perfectly "Smooth" and could very easily distort any image beyond recognition if there were fluctuations in it.

 

Oh well, Thanks anyway lads, it was worth asking