1 min read24th Jan 20222 comments
This is a special post for quick takes by Coafos. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
2 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:24 AM

It's evening, the sun is set. A man walks up to a scholar:
"Scholar, the sun rose yesterday and today morning. Will it rise again tomorrow?"
"Man, I don't know, it's kinda dark right now. Have you heard about the no free lunch theorem?"

One of my favourite Gettier-like problems is about black holes.

Say you have a very dense star. It is so dense, that the gravitational force on its surface is capable of pulling back even the particles of its light, leaving only a black hole in the sky. How large can it be with a given mass?

It's an easy exercise using Newtonian mechanics. Take a light particle with mass . Its gravitational energy at a distance is , and its kinetic energy is at the start. If the total energy is negative, then the path of the light particles will stay within a boundary. Therefore, the answer to the question is , if the object is smaller than this, then it will be a black hole.

Of course, for that dense objects, Newtonian predictions break down. We should care about curved spacetime and use general relativity in our calculations. The answer (to my knowledge) is the Schwarzschild radius, which is .