Replying to Akinbo Ojo's comment of Feb. 18, 2014 - "Rodney, In your own view of black holes, how do clocks behave near them?" (Answering this will be great mental exercise for me! And I do love exercise!)
Hi Akinbo,
If you could compare the speed of a clock you carried into a black hole with that of a reference clock kept far away, then the clock falling into the black hole would appear to slow down relative to the clock far from the hole (at the event horizon, it would appear to stop). This is how I came to that conclusion (a conclusion shared by a little thing called Relativity).
It's impossible to point to the 4th dimension of time, so this cannot be physical. Since the union of space-time is well established in modern science, we can assume the 4th dimension is actually measurement of the motions of particles (both in the 3 dimensions of length, width, and height and - I believe - in a 5th-dimensional hyperspace where they're called "dark matter"). The Endnotes of my 2014 FQXi essay state that the idea of instability in space of more than 3 dimensions is based on the assumption that gravity is purely attractive. However, Einstein showed that attraction of two bodies of matter actually results from space-time's curvature pushing bodies (is this "repulsive" gravity known as dark energy?).
The basic standard of time in the universe is the measurement of the motions of photons - specifically, of the speed of light. This is comparable to the 1960's adoption on Earth of the measurement of time as the vibration rate of cesium atoms. At Lightspeed, time = 0 (it is stopped). Below 300,000 km/sec, acceleration or gravitation causes time dilation (slowing of time as the speed of light is approached). If time's 0, space is also 0 because space and time coexist as space-time whose warping (gravity) is necessarily 0 too. Spacetime/gravity form matter/mass (addressed shortly in this message), so the latter pair can't exist at lightspeed and photons are massless at that velocity. Gravitons are also massless at Lightspeed since electromagnetism and gravitation are both disturbances in unified space-time.
How can space-time cease to exist at Lightspeed? Total elimination of distance, or space-time, produces nothing in a physical sense and reverts to theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's imagining of strings as "not made of anything at all" (p.35 of Dr. Sten Odenwald's article "What String Theory Tells Us About the Universe": Astronomy - April 2013). It also reverts the universe to the mathematical blueprint from which physical being is constructed (this agrees with cosmologist Max Tegmark's hypothesis that mathematical formulas create reality, http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math#.UZsHDaIwebs and http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646). So, infinity = something (maths), agreeing with Dr. Sten Odenwald's statement on p.32 of his article, that "The basic idea is that every particle of matter ... and every particle that transmits a force ... is actually a small one-dimensional loop of something." (Like infinity, this something would be maths - I believe it's base-2 maths.) The next paragraph may be another way of relating gravitation and acceleration. Just as accelerating to lightspeed means matter/mass ceases to exist, matter stops existing in a black hole. Far from becoming infinitely dense and infinitely massive, the matter is reduced to binary digits.
In the case of the sun, our star would become a black hole if it was compressed to 2.95 kms ("From the Big Bang to Dark Energy" - a lecture on coursera.org by Hitoshi Murayama from the University of Tokyo), in which case the pressure increase "shreds" the sun into its binary digits. In other words, its mass is relativistically converted into the energy of binary digits i.e. the bosons stop interacting in wave packets to produce the forces we identify as mass, and the bosons - which are ultimately composed of the binary digits depicting pi, e, в€љ2 etc. (see "Digital String Theory") - register as 1's and 0's.
Back to black holes - there's no such thing as a quark-electron mixture forming Quark Stars. But there is a mixture of 1's and 0's forming matter, energy, forces, and all space-time. The formation of binary digits that most resembles stars, or masses of perhaps billions of stars, would be that part of space-time called Black Holes. Black holes aren't composed of matter but do have mass because they are meeting-places and "sinks" for the gravitational currents flowing in and between galaxies.** They possess charge because the universe's mathematical foundation unites gravity/spacetime with electricity/magnetism (see the paragraph about Digital String Theory in my essay). Since it has mass, a black hole can naturally possess the 3rd property of holes viz. spin.
Einstein's work famously showed that time is relative. In 1907 his General Theory of Relativity showed that clocks run more quickly at higher altitudes because they experience a weaker gravitational force than clocks on the surface of the Earth. Going into more detail, my own thoughts are -
Suppose Albert Einstein was correct when he said gravitation plays a role in the constitution of elementary particles (in "Do Gravitational Fields Play An Essential Part In The Structure of the Elementary Particles?" - a 1919 submission to the Prussian Academy of Sciences). And suppose he was also correct when he said gravitation is the warping of space-time. Then it is logical that 1) gravitation would play a role in constitution of elementary particles, and their mass, and also in the constitution of the forces associated with those particles, and 2) the warping of space-time that produces gravity means space-time itself plays a role in the constitution of elementary particles, their mass, and the forces. Matter can be thought of as "coherent space" that is bound by forces. There's a stronger gravitational force on the surface of the Earth because gravity is concentrated in the matter there (see WHY IS GRAVITY WEAK? in my essay). So, like a black hole, time is slowed down at lower altitudes (but far less, of course).
What would I do without Einstein's theories to support all my wild ideas?