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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

We have tried to heal Babylon, ...

... but she cannot be healed. -- Jeremiah 51:9

One of the nasty things about crossing an event horizon is nothing happens locally to indicate that a fateful threshold has been crossed and destruction can no longer be averted.  If you're busy gazing into your navel, you will remain clueless, though the signs can be seen clearly if you look to the distance.  For a two-meter tall human being, the difference in gravitational acceleration between his head and his feet as he crossed the Schwarzscshild radius of the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4889 (the largest known black hole) would only be about 5 x 10-11 m/s2 -- smaller than the same difference for a man standing on Earth by a factor of about 100,000.

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