Since we have now confirmed that two black holes can combine into one, I have wondered about the Lagrange point (balancing of gravity) that has to exist between them.  As the two holes approach and get very close, would the Lagrange point temporarily become a place where there is no event horizon?  For a moment, would it be a place where trapped photons and information could escape from the black holes?
I have an intuitive scenario. Consider we have a spaceship just below the event horizon of a BH, which is merging with another black hole.  Finally, the singularities merge and we have a single black hole again.  But, in the transient stage, it is unclear to me if a timelike world-line would exist to leave the system.  I suspect, the metric is probably far too complex for an analytical solution, but in the worst case, it could be maybe solved numerically.  As far I know, black hole merges are examined mainly in an inspiral scenario. I suspect, maybe the escape is possible only if they have a hyperbolic-like orbit (i.e. there is no inspiral, but they simply collide).  Is it possible?
I stumbled upon a  with the following paragraph:     MBIE has launched an investigation into claims Chinese galvanised   steel coil imports have been dumped on the local market, causing   "material injury" to New Zealand industry, and the case will end up on   the table of newly appointed Commerce Minister Jacqui Dean.   I thought that sentence was grammatically wrong because the author should put the word "that" (as a conjunction) right after the word "claim". I don't see why the author could drop the conjunction. Is this a prevailing phenomenon in American or Australian English? What identifies an action-reaction pair of forces? This is a question on a worksheet that I'm giving to a student:  A man of weight $W$ steps into the lift. The lift then moves downwards with a constant speed. If $R$ represents the force acting on the man by the lift floor, which of the following statements is/are correct? (3) $R$ and $W$ are an action-reaction pair according to Newton's third law  Why isn't this statement (3) correct? I wanted to send a single email to different users. I save an email to drafts and send the email to a user and it goes to the sent box instead of staying in the drafts box. Is there a way I can send an email repeatedly from the drafts box? Consider the following piece of Markdown code:  This is some regular text.      &gt;&gt;&gt; def factorial(n):     ...     return 1 if n &lt; 2 else n * factorial(n - 1)     ...   * This is a list item.      &gt;&gt;&gt; def factorial(n):     ...     return 1 if n &lt; 2 else n * factorial(n - 1)     ...    Notice that the second code block is preceded by a list item.   Why is the factorial code not properly formatted under these circumstances? To demonstrate the problem, I'll insert the Markdown code show above:    This is some regular text.  &gt;&gt;&gt; def factorial(n): ...     return 1 if n &lt; 2 else n * factorial(n - 1) ...     This is a list item                 def factorial(n):       ...     return 1 if n &lt; 2 else n * factorial(n - 1)       ...               This applies to numbered as well as unnumbered lists. The future of meta.stackoverflow and meta.stackexchange Historically this site, , has been the place to ask questions about not just Stack Overflow, but the functioning of the entire Stack Exchange (2.0) network, including Area 51 and stackexchange.com and careers.  (Yes, there was a , but that dealt with the old legacy Stack Exchange 1.0 sites. It was deprecated a while ago, and currently redirects here.)  Now that we've gotten many, many months under our belt from the SE 1.0 days, I think it's time that we gave Stack Overflow its own, true per-site meta, and moved the higher level network meta discussions to meta.stackexchange.com.  Over time, it's begun to bug me more and more that requests for Stack Overflow, the site, kind of get buried here on meta.stackoverflow under the avalanche of network issues. Retag requests, synonym requests, things truly specific to Stack Overflow, the site, not the network. This is unfair to our vastly largest and flagship Q&amp;A site, and it's unfair to the Stack Overflow users to mix their requests in with network level concerns.  It's also odd that Stack Overflow is the only network site without a proper, dedicated per-site meta, where its meta has its own reputation system not tied to the parent site in any way.  This is mostly a quirk of history more than anything else, and I believe it is now an appropriate time to split into two sites:   , a proper per-site meta for Stack Overflow with integrated rep , a global network meta with its own reputation system   Yes, this will be painful. But I believe it is a good, necessary, and healthy step both for the future of the network and the future of Stack Overflow.  Some things to discuss:   which questions should be migrated from here to meta.so? Obviously site-specific things like the retag-requests, and perhaps questions with the  tag. Anything that is 100% wholly specific to Stack Overflow and not generalizable to the rest of the network should be moved over. This may be a pretty small, narrow list of questions, and that's OK. Should we do some meta spring cleaning in our transition? Which questions / tags should be blown away as no longer relevant, referring to ancient versions of Stack Overflow or issues that have long since ceased to exist and aren't instructive for any future visitors? Your meta reps will generally be unaffected, except insofar as we delete for spring cleaning, or move site-specific things to meta.so. We still plan to have a distinct reputation system for the new meta.se site, just like here.   I do not have a timeline for this change, that is up to Jarrod and David to decide. It may be months away. However, we feel pretty strongly that this is something that we need to do to clean things up and pave the way for the future -- so I expect it will happen in the next few months, giving us lots of time to decide how we want to do it, per the above.  Update  . First Bash Script Problem Possible Duplicate:                I know that the sum of the squares of the first n natural numbers is $\frac{n(n + 1)(2n + 1)}{6}$. I know how to prove it inductively. But how, presuming I have no idea about this formula, should I determine it? The sequence $a(n)=1^2+2^2+...+n^2$ is neither geometric nor arithmetic. The difference between the consecutive terms is 4, 9, 16 and so on, which doesn't help. Could someone please help me and explain how should I get to the well known formula assuming I didn't know it and was on some desert island? When are "if" and "whether" equivalent? Are if and whether equivalent in sentences like the ones below?     How to determine if my saddle is too high?   How to determine whether my saddle is too high?         We should check if everything is okay now.   We should check whether everything is okay now. Is the wave-particle duality a real duality? One part of the render layer glowing? For many of my datasets I have the same imported data duplicated numerous times, each iteration displaying the data values for a different column (in my case it's fish catch weight per gridded cell per year, so lots of iterations of the same grid, with a different pattern of values per year).  For presentation purposes, it strikes me as helpful to use the same scale for each year, so I go to the original data and divide the maximum value into (arbitrarily) 10 classes and manually input the values and labels after setting the desired colour ramp and input data field:   This is extremely tedious, not just the manual excel calculation part, but also the input interface for the values &amp; labels*, hence my intention to make use of the 'save style' option. HOWEVER: when I save the style as QML and load it for the next layer, it saves everything - including the data field (in my case, year). When I change this field, QGis automatically generates the values &amp; labels based on the data for that field, ditching all of the values &amp; labels I set.   Is there any way to avoid this happening &amp; thereby duplicate class number, values and labels for each field by simply loading a style? (somewhat meta) Am I going around this the wrong way, OR, is there a different face I could use to climb this mountain? Is there a general way to change the font of a particular symbol without switching packages?  For example, suppose I'm using Computer Modern for my entire document, but I want the "subset" operator to look as it does in mathabx.  How can I redefine it to appear in this way? I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop. My charger has stopped working.  I have access to a Lenovo charger. Can I use this charger on my laptop? Why does this not work with an imaginary exponent? How to attach my repo to heroku app How do we see? Where do the photons disappear? I know that the light is reflected from a object to my eyes, but I don't understand exactly how. The photons appear from the light source and disappear in my eye! Can someone explain the phenomenon of where the photons go and do to allow us to see? Proof that $1729$ is the smallest taxicab number Can I use the Stack Exchange concept in my own sites? I am thinking of making a site which will have a forum. I already have a lot of users (in an old forum, which I want to renew).  I like the Stack Exchange concept (voting, reputation, etc).  Can I build one of my own on my site? (I don't intend to copy any source code, just the concept itself.)  Is the concept patented or otherwise legally protected, or is it free to use? Why is HMAC-SHA1 still considered secure? This Q &amp; A   says that the security of HMAC-SHA1 does not depend on resistance to collisions? Are they are saying specifically with respect to HOTP or for HMAC-SHA1 for any use?     If HMAC-SHA1 is used for verifying the integrity of a document and you can find a collision, you can make changes in the document, right?      Even the RFC says that resistance to collisions is relevant       The security of the message authentication mechanism presented here depends on cryptographic properties of the hash function H: the resistance to collision finding (limited to the case where the initial value is secret and random, and where the output of the function is not explicitly available to the attacker), and the message authentication property of the compression function of H when applied to single blocks    What am I missing here? There's a problem statement:     For each $m \in \mathbb{N}$, we construct a sequence $m_0$, $m_1$, $m_2,\dots$ denoted $S_m$, recursively via $m_0=m$ and      $$m_{i+1} = m_i + \left\lfloor \sqrt{m_i} \right\rfloor$$      for all $i \ge 0$.   Here, $\lfloor x \rfloor$ is the floor of $x$, the greatest integer less than or equal to $x$.   Hence, we have $\left\lfloor \sqrt{10} \right\rfloor=3$ and $\left\lfloor \sqrt{29} \right\rfloor=5$.      Show that for each positive integer $m$, the sequence $S_m$ contains the square of some integer.   I'm pretty certain that this can be proved with induction. I am just not quite sure what to induct on. Examining examples shows that $S_m$ always results in a perfect square eventually, though I'm not sure how to prove it.