Black hole transit = slingshot effect

[Lindley]

One of the things that bugged me about the movie was the idea that falling into a black hole could send you back in time.

Well, that bugged me after I got over the fact that a black hole with at little initial mass as those shouldn't be sucking in anything not directly in its own trajectory.

But I got to thinking: If a ship fell past the event horizon while attempting to escape at high warp, then the slingshot effect might begin to take hold---the ship would begin moving back in time, just like it was going around a sun.

Except.....this is a very new black hole. So as soon as the time reversal begins, suddenly the black hole isn't there anymore. This would represent an enormous warp breakaway and might just be enough to fling a ship through space as well as time to the distant locations Spock and Nero ended up.

 

[SonicRanger]

Sometimes a black hole is just a black hole, but sometime may allow travel...

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/04/58359

Under certain circumstances, black holes may have "Cauchy horizon singularities," which may not be destructive but still act as openings to a wormhole.

Earlier work by Burko and others suggested weaker singularities were present in rotating black holes.

In a paper published in the March 28 issue of Physical Review Letters, Burko suggests that under certain conditions, hybrid singularities may exist. These hybrid singularities are composed of a strong sector, which is destructive, and a weak sector, which may not be. Any spacecraft entering the weak sector could possibly pass through without being damaged.

It's all theoretical, but the possibility of a weaker singularity doesn't rule out the potential of using black holes for interstellar travel.

"At the moment, we don’t have compelling evidence that this kind of hyperspace travel is disallowed," said Burko. "It doesn't mean, of course, it is allowed, but we don’t have compelling evidence to the contrary."

Princeton physicist Richard Gott, author of Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, said he hadn't read Burko's latest paper, but previous work on the subject reopened some interesting possibilities.

"It's certainly one of the possibilities that you can have a weak singularity," he said. "I characterize it like a speed bump. You hit it, and you come out in a new region. It could be a region of time travel, another universe or somewhere a great distance away. These are interesting possibilities and should be investigated further."

 

[Opus]

And then I remembered that Star Trek is fiction...

 

[Lindley]

And then I remembered that Star Trek is fiction...

No, really? Why doesn't anyone tell us these things?

 

[Creedence]

I think it may be fair to say that black holes rarely exist in their pure destroy-everything-nothing-escapes state in the Star Trek universe(s). They quite often act as worm holes that join distant places and may also traverse time, forward or back.

If there's a way to use a black hole - even a new one - to effect time travel, I'm sure Spock could figure out the math.

 

[Silversmok3]

Well, since current science has no means of verifying what happens when you do pass an event horizon of a Black Hole, it could take you back in time. Or it could take you forward in time. Or it could convert you into cheeze.

We just dont know, and unless someone built an FTL ship in their garage, we wont know for a looonnnnnng time.

 

[Lindley]

Current science actually does have some fairly reasonable models of what a fall into a black hole would look like:
http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schw.shtml

But the mystery is what happens at the singularity itself. That's the part we don't have a clue about.

 

[Peter the Younger]

There are multiple ways it could have gone down. As SonicRanger pointed out, there are types of singularities that can spawn wormholes, and wormholes can readily become time machines if the two ends are in different reference frames.

If we don't want to go the wormhole route, we could also say that warp fields, being themselves a distortion of spacetime, act as a sort of multiplier to the gravitational curvature of a black hole (or the sun, if you want to bring ST IV into it.) So you can treat the singularity as if it was a Tipler cylinder or some other utterly massive object, which is typically what physicists use for timelike curve, slingshot-style time travel.