Thursday, November 8, 2018

Astronomers excited about black holes

NY Times science writer Dennis Overbye writes about the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

The article mentions Einstein ten times, even tho he had almost nothing to do with the concept.

Black holes were first proposed in 1784. The relativistic equations for a black hole were found by Schwarzschild and a student of Lorentz's, but many mistakenly thought that there was a singularity on the event horizon. Some modern theoretical physicists still think that there is such a singularity, in order to preserve their intuition about information emerging from evaporating black holes.

Much as I like to see relativity research research, the astronomy work on black holes does not have much to do with relativity.
Black holes — objects so dense that not even light can escape them — are a surprise consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which ascribes the phenomenon we call gravity to a warping of the geometry of space and time.
Not really. Since 1784 it has been understood that if gravitational force obeys an inverse square law, and the mass is sufficiently concentrated, then the escape velocity will exceed the speed of light and a black hole results.

Relativity does predict some strange things inside the event horizon of a black hole, but relativity also teaches that none of that is observable, so we will never know. There is no proof that there is any sort of singularity.

While general relativity is commonly described as explaining gravity as the warping of the geometry of space and time, that was not Einstein's view. He denounced this geometrical interpretation. And he did not believe in black holes.
“The road is wide open to black hole physics,” Dr. Eisenhauer proclaimed.
It is true that we are getting a lot more info about black holes. A few decades ago we were not even sure that they exist, and now they are crucial for theories of galaxy formation, for explaining the brightest objects in the universe, and for studying gravity waves.

But all that stuff about singularities, entropy, evaporation, firewalls, information conservation, and quantum gravity are completely out of reach.

1 comment:

  1. Einstein didn't 'invent' the black hole. Hilbert did. Physicists also seem to conflate the mathematical properties of Newton's black body (a mass so high even light can't escape, but which additional masses can be calculated with in interactions)and Hilbert's black hole 'model' which is based in a purely mathematical space with no more than one mass which prevents it from modeling interaction with additional masses.

    The only way you can get a space time black hole mathematically is to use Hilbert's slight of hand, First you remove the source (all energy and the physical extension of the mass - you set your energy tensor to zero) from your space time (mathematical space) and re-inset the mass back in (by handwaving/magic basically) without its physical extension of the source, you now are claiming your locational 'point' (which has no physical extension whatsoever, it is just a placeholder) as the source of your mass. This is linguistic bullshit, not physics. There are no sources of mass (or energy) without physical extension...unless you wish to pretend that mathematical abstractions of diagrams actually have physical presence, meaning lines, planes, triangles, etc, all have mass.... which is ridiculous. You might as well assign mass to question mark or an exclamation point or an emoji.

    When your mass has a measureable finite size, it is stripped of its infinite magic space bending powers. Surprise. Hiding inside calculation data holes, like assigning values to 'zero' and doing arithmetic with it anyway while claiming it has physical extension is stupid, as it is clearly undefined and always has been undefined since rudimentary arithmetic, until modern physicists started pretending that you can claim any definition you like in such undefined data holes. This is where the magic comes from, as the model is clearly trying to describe physical properties from something that has no physical extension to assign the mass to (This is a clear no-no, even said so by Einstein. No source, no mass or energy). By doing this, you are pretending you can measure the size of an undefined angel or 'point' in gravitational relation to the defined size of the head of your pin and claiming they are doing the Macarena. Congratulations, Welcome to metaphyics. This is the same crap that has crippled HEP, treat a particle (or anything physical) as a point and start crunching numbers about how the abstraction interacts with something finite.

    The only other dirty little secret they conveniently forget to mention is the pretense you can have gravity not only without a source (physical extension of mass), but without anything for the gravity to act upon, which is a significant side effect of using a non-linear mathematical space that can accommodate ONE and ONLY ONE mass, Pseudo Riemannian is STILL NON-LINEAR. You can't pile up additional masses in a non linear system unless once again you are bullshitting with the definition of what non-linear means. Putting the word 'pseudo' in front of a defined mathematical term does not grant the non-linear math with magical powers. For all intents and purposes, logically and mathematically, black holes are nothing but a colossal undefined 'bait and switch' or 'pea in the shell' con.

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