this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] procrastitron@lemmy.world 320 points 2 weeks ago (61 children)

I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.

His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”

If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.

[–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 50 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

another thing I learned at some point: Just because a physics formula returns a result, doesn't mean that it's reality

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 38 points 2 weeks ago

TBF black holes themselves were originally just the result of a Physics formula, but they eventually turned out to be a "reality". Sometimes that shit happens, yo.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago

Iff the rules of physics are accurate then it does, but we don't know that they are. In fact, we're pretty sure we're missing some things. See: The Crisis in Cosmology.

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