donch@teklabs.UUCP (Don Chitwood) (08/15/85)
I've recently been reading several SF books on black holes and their local physical properties when this wild thought struck me. Namely, as Larry Niven and others point out, the gravity well around a black hole can produce tidal effects in objects. Fine. Carry the effects of the black hole a little farther, such as in Frederick Pohl's Heechee Chronicles series where time slows increasingly with gravitational intensity. Ahhhh. Now we get to it: what about "time tides"? (An inappropriate description, perhaps, but it rolls off the tongue nicely.) If you/(the object of your choice) are close enough to the black hole so that the gravity gradient is very steep, then, say you extend your left arm toward the black hole (assuming it doesn't rip off) and your right arm radially away from the hole, wrist-watches on each arm would show different times, indeed they would be running at different rates. The philosophical question then becomes, what happens to a body that experiences different time rates at different locations? Your left hand stays relatively young, while the right gets grey with age (not to mention that all the blood leaves your right hand and swells up the left; I'm ignoring such troublesome details). Perhaps the question is: what is the physical effect of an accelerating, localized "time field". Am I missing something basic here? Is there any reference to this aspect of black holes in the SF literature? Don Chitwood Teklabs Tektronix, Inc time "field"?