Reb Shalom's Vort on Makkas Choshech (Egyptian Time Dilation)

I have the great fortune to work with a hidden chassid, and most certainly a rosleener, Reb Shalom. he is a mashgiach for the Star-K. something i said clued him in to the fact that i was interested in astrophysics and he told me the following vort about makkas choshech. in my desire to share this interesting insight, as well as my ever-preasent desire to write more, i thought i would start up the old Blogspot engines and put something down in "writing."

In order to share E' Shalom's torah we have to first be makdim with some talk about Einsteins general theory of relativity. I am by no means an expert and it could be i am understanding these things wrong, i could be at best called an enthusiast and at worst woefully ignorant, but here is my attempt at explaining these deep and profound concepts. If anybody who knows these things could comment and let me know how i did it would be great. 

You can't talk about Einstein without talking about Newton. Newton was stuck in quarantine for a long period due to the spread of the black plague and he used his time, some would say productively, creating the worlds of calculus and classical or Newtonian mechanics, the latter being what most pertains to the subject at hand. 

      The famous story of Newton and the apple is probably apocryphal, or so they say, but what the story does get right is that gravity is the key to it all, and gravity, whether exerted on an apple or otherwise, is what got him thinking about how the force worked and so trying to compose equations that could predict the influence of that force on all matter. And so classical mechanics was born. Newton figured out to a very surprising degree of exactitude the force of gravity and how it worked. how far a canon ball will go when launched at a certain angle with a certain degree of propulsion.

and everything else as well (here is where is where my ignorance is showing, i can't come up with a better example of physics than a canon ball...).

And Newton was right about most everything! he figured most of it out but there were a few things that famously could still not be explained according to his equations, most famously the movement of the planet Mercury across the sky. you see where Newtonian mechanics is lacking is that he did not even attempt to explain the underlying force of gravity per se. he just made lots of observations about it and created equations that would encompass and express those phenomena.

And Newton was king, for 500 some odd years, until Einstein came around and changed everything.

Einstein got at the root of the issue and explained the force of gravity per se. He envisioned a fabric of space time that created gravitation when distorted by mass and or gravity. there was an essential connection between space, time, and light and they all affected each other, and mass and gravity created distortions in those forces. (an in-depth explanation of that last sentence is needed, but i am digressing so much already i will have to push that off for another time).

what is important though, and what i will take a second to explain is the concept of time dilation. time dilation  is one of those distortions i spoke about before. without getting in to the weeds, and as i alluded to before, Einstein theorized that space and time were connected and that mass and gravity creates in them distortions. namely, in areas of great mass or great gravity, time slows down.

this creates a very interesting thought experiment when we take a second to consider black holes. black holes are thought to be collapsed stars that have created an almost infinitely dense environment. since we said that density creates distortions in space-time, that almost infinite density creates an almost infinitely strong force of gravity and and almost infinite time dilation.

lets unpack this a little.

there is something called escape speed. escape speed is something that belongs to Newtonian mechanics. escape speed is the speed necessary to break a given mass' gravitational force. The stronger the force, the faster you need to go to escape. Earth, with our relatively weak gravitational force, requires that in order to escape earth's atmosphere you have to be moving 11.2 kilometers a second. One of the other things Einstein's theory says is that it is impossible to move faster than the speed of light, around 300,000 Km a second. so if you think of a gravitational force like earths, but you keep turning up the mass, and so the force of gravity keeps going up, and so the escape speed keeps going up. if you could conceive of a mass so great that it creates a gravitational force so strong that the escape speed eclipses the 300,000 km a second, boom -- you have a black whole that nothing could escape, even light.

if we take this idea just a little further we can conceive of a point of no return in relation to this gravitational force. as we get closer to the source of the gravity the force gets stronger, as we pass the point where it gets so strong that even the 300,000 km a second cant escape, you have crossed the point of no return, or what the scientists call the event horizon.  

so as you approach this event  horizon you begin to experience time dilation. that is as you get closer, and the force of gravity becomes stronger, time begins to slow down. so if i were watching you fall in to a black hole from earth at the start every second for me is a second for you. but as you get closer time for you slows down and it takes you two seconds for every second on earth. so as you fall closer you time gets slower and slower, eventually a year for you is a second here and you would be in super super slow motion from earths vantage point. As you you approach the event horizon time has slowed down so much that a second for you is an infinity here on earth, so if i was watching you fall pass the event horizon you would be slowing and slowing until a second for you is an infinity here on earth and you would, for all intents and purposes be permanently stopped from a vantage point of earth (to tickle your noggin you can think about how according to the guy falling, nothing changes, and your second passes in moment, like any other second).

So now to get to Reb Shalom's vort. he brought up the famous comment from the Rabbis that the darkness of the plague of darkness was not like any other darkness, it was a heavy darkness that prohibited the Egyptians from moving. it was Reb Shalom's contention that god created a black hole here on earth. it absorbed the light creating an appearance of darkness and time slowed down for the Egyptians so much that a second for them was the whole duration of the plague to everyone else. it wasn't that they couldn't move, it is that time slowed down so much for them due to the gravitational environment used to create the darkness. the entire plague lasted but a moment for them.

Chag Kasher V'Sameach

~ChassidShoteh