4. Freefall in the Schwarzschild Metric and Entropy Generation at the Singularity
In the previous section, we proposed a mapping of the path of freefalling particles through the singularities and expanding and collapsing Universes and Antiverses. We will now look at the worldlines of particles in the Schwarzschild spacetime to understand better the nature of the worldlines inside the black/white holes and at the singularity.
For this we will construct a new coordinate chart for the Schwarzschild metric. In this chart, use the proper interval as the vertical axis and the radius as the horizontal axis.
We first examine the exterior manifold on this chart. The
t coordinate is the time coordinate here, so on this chart, we want surfaces of constant
t. At fixed
r, points on each of the lines of constant
t are found by setting
in equation
5 to get
. When integrating, this gives
. So if we plot
vs.
r for different fixed values of
t, we get a set of curves represnting foliations of constant
t of the extrior manifold.
We do the same for the interior metric; only this time, instead of using the proper time, we need to use proper distance:
and integrating gives us
. And we then plot lines of constant
t using this equation.
Figure 6 shows this coordinate chart with three different worldlines falling from rest at
for different values of
r.
To create the freefalling worldlines, we need to find the expression for proper time as a function of
r for the freefaller. We start with the per-unit-mass energy condition:
The particle falls from rest at
, meaning
at
. Therefore
. This gives us the following expression for a particle falling from rest at
:
Integrating this expression gives us the desired function:
Equation
26 is the equation used to plot the solid lines on
Figure 6 which represent particle falling from
,
, and
.
We typically think of the coordinates switching roles when the particle crosses the horizon such that the
r coordinate becomes the time coordinate in the interior metric. But there is another way to interpret this. We can look at it as the particle’s worldline becoming spacelike at the horizon. The spacelike worldline has to keep moving through space, it cannot slow down. This is why the particles are driven toward the singularity, they cannot come to rest in the interior metric because they are spacelike. This explains why the proper interval on
Figure 6 is the proper distance and not proper time for
. Proper distance is the interval we use to measure spacelike worldlines.
If we compare the worldline at the singularity to the worldline when the particle was at rest, we note that when the particle is at rest, the worldline is parallel to the proper time interval axis. However, at the singularity, the worldline is perpendicular to that axis.
The infalling speed of light in the exterior metric at some
is given by:
If we express this in terms of proper time of the observer at rest (
) at
instead of
t, we get the following:
If we compare Equation
28 to Equation
25, we see that, at
for an observer falling from
, their
is equal to
, which is the speed of light in the frame of a rest observer at the location from which they began falling. So, in the frame of the observer at rest at
, the falling observer is moving at the speed of light as they cross the horizon. In the frame of the rest observer, the freefaller reaches the speed of light at the horizon and then becomes spacelike as they cross it until the falling worldline becomes horizontal on the coordinate chart at the singularity. The particle essentially has infinite velocity relative to the observer at rest when it reaches the singularity.
Note that in
Figure 6, we have only used positive
t on the chart. We can account for negative
t by mirroring the chart in the
line, which essentially gives us the top left quadrant of the Kruskal Szekeres chart, where we said the particles emerge from a white hole into a collapsing spacetime. Doing this gives the worldline a way to transit the singularity.
So relative to the rest observer, the freefalling worldline starts to go backward in time (the worldline goes from being horizontal on the chart to moving in a downward direction). This is why we say that the particle emerges into the Antiverse. It is the Antiverse because, in the Antiverse, particles move through time in the opposite direction relative to particles in the Universe. This also suggests that the particles in the Antiverse are antiparticles if the particles in the Universe are particles.
Now, for both the freefalling particle and infalling light, goes to zero at the singularity. For the freefalling particle, this does not mean it stops at the singularity. We note that as the worldline approaches the singularity, is negative because the line starts at at the horizon and moves to at the singularity. But in the mirrored spacetime, the worldline emerges from the singularity at and moves toward at the white hole horizon, meaning is also negative in that case. Furthermore, is negative when approaching the singularity and positive when leaving the singularity. Therefore, is positive when approaching the singularity and negative when leaving the singularity, which is why it is zero at the singularity. Therefore, the particle can transit the singularity.
But radially infalling light is infitiely redshifted as it approaches the singularity and any light emitted from the singularity is also infinitely redshifted. Therefore, radially infalling light effectively cannot pass the singularity. This might seem like a paradox, expect that, as has been argued, the particle’s worldline is spacelike and therefore it is as though the speed of the radially falling light is zero in the frame of the particle at the singularity. At that point, the particle is effectively moving so fast that light itself cannot follow. In other words, observers looking into the white hole from the collapsing Anitverse cannot see the light that fell into the black hole in the expanding Universe.
We also see that at , the worldlines for particles that fell from different values of are separated by a finite proper distance, they are not infinitely stretched. So if the and worldlines represented the worldlines of the feet and head of an observer falling to the singularity, we see that the proper distance between the feet and head at the singularity is finite and therefore the observer is not infinitely stretched.
However, the angular dimensions do collapse at the singularity such that the observer will be squeezed infinitely in the angular dimensions there. Thus, any structure falling to the singularity will be destroyed by this crush, and the information will be scrambled at the singularity. Particles may even emerge from the singularity in both directions after this crush, where particles emitted into the negative t space will escape out of the white hole into the collapsing Antiverse as high entropy matter while any particles emitted into the positive t space would either fall back to the singularity or be emitted from the black hole back into the expanding Universe as spacelike particles.
We can therefore imagine that the singularity is surrounded by a hot, chaotic region of particles falling in and popping out. If spacelike particles can, in fact, be re-emitted into the expanding Universe, they could be candidates for Dark Matter, appearing as particle-sized event horizons. The Dark Matter in this scenario would be like smoke generated by the gravitational singularities. This is obviously highly speculative at this stage and would require further research to model such a system.
Therefore, we have shown that massive particles can in fact transit the Schwarzschild singularity, but any information associated with the particles is destroyed when reaching it and the entropy of the particles leaving the white hole will be maximized.
We can revolve
Figure 6 about the
axis to show the
dimension as well. Interestingly, we have two choices for how we revolve the spacetime for the
dimension. We can revolve it clockwise or counter-clockwise. This rotational choice changes the parity of the spacetime (a given angular velocity is positive in one case and negative in the other). What is notable is that the two configurations are superposed on one another and they share the same singularity.