【Selected Readings】

Albert Einstein declared that space and time are relative, and nowhere is this more evident than on black holes. Within a strong gravitational field, time slows down, a natural consequence of what general relativity has proven countless times. As you can imagine, every time the second hand of a clock beats, it takes more time to fight gravity. The black hole is far away from us, and right next to us, the global positioning satellite orbits the earth at an altitude of more than 20,000 meters, and the signal it emits is our mobile phone and car navigation, it must be considered that the clock on the satellite goes slightly faster than the clock on the earth, because the clock on the earth is subject to the gravitational pull of the earth.

The gravitational field of a black hole is so strong that even light cannot escape, and it is like a "sinkhole" with the most powerful gravitational pull in the universe, where the relativity of space and time is most obvious. Imagine sitting on the surface of a collapsing star and looking at your watch before it shrinks into its event horizon and becomes a black hole, and you feel like time is passing normally minute by minute. What you don't feel, however, is that the future history of the universe is speeding by at close to the speed of light, and those who look at you from a distance see a very different picture, because the observer is far away from the huge gravitational field of the black hole, and what they see you from a distance is forever stuck in a state of transparencing.

Of course, for you, this is not the case. In your temporal frame of reference, you would die instantly, but from the observer's point of view, you seem to be standing still at the edge of the horizon, forever so young, never destroyed. From a distant observer's point of view, time at the edge of the black hole's event horizon stands almost completely still, which is why theoretical physicists originally referred to black holes as "frozen stars." In fact, to distant observers, the star still appears black and swarthy, because the wavelengths of the light that finally escaped from the star are stretched to infinity in such a way that our eyes can't perceive them at all.

Influenced by the idea of "frozen stars", early astrophysicists believed that black holes were static, petrified objects that would have no effect on the universe around us. But today's black hole theory is quite mature, and physicists such as Kip Thorne, Richard Price, and Stephen Hawking have clearly told us that black holes are dynamic and developing, and that they will devour everything around them, store energy, and release energy. If an astronaut is at the edge of a black hole at this moment, and eternal youth is only a sign of what the outside world sees, there is no doubt that he will quickly cross the event horizon and fall to the "singularity", and in the process, he will be destined to be broken down into quantum particles.

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