Charles Liu

No.

It's a different particle.

If you want me to circle back to what Jana and Brian were trying to talk about, I don't have any more insight than they do.

They are much closer to the forefront of quantum research than I am.

But what I would say is that you're thinking of a quantum particle like a quark, like a classical particle, which feels tidal forces.

Right.

If you think of a cork instead of a thing that can be pulled apart, like our bodies, like from our noses to our feet or something like that, then you get this weird catastrophe.

But if you think of it as a packet of energy or quantum information, then as it falls in, it doesn't get stretched physically.

It gets changed in a way, perhaps, because of the tremendous gravitational tides and influences, but it will not actually wind up with more quarks.

You'll wind up with a bundle of energy going to the event horizon and the event horizon growing to encompass it.

That's my intuition.

I think I would have to work the math out to make sure.

Correct.

That's right.

Right now, the odds are there is not going to be a big rip.

Really?

Because of the necessity, the condition that a big rip requires, as far as we know, this idea of phantom energy being the dark energy component of the universe.

And that would imply that we should see negative energy particles popping out in the universe, like randomly being generated.

Do they have negative gravity?

They would have negative gravity.