- #1
Thinkor
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The majority view in the physics community is that black holes not only can exist, but do exist.
I accepted this for a long time, but I recently came across a website that claims black holes cannot exist and provides references to a great many papers on the topic that don't seem at all to be the typical crackpot/crank material. (I must point out, however, that the website author appears to be a bit cranky, in the sense of "irritable about the issue", although not crackpotty.)
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com"
Intuitively, I understand the argument to be this: It seems obvious that black holes can exist, because, when you keep adding mass to a large mass, at some point the force of gravity will be so strong that even light cannot escape the gravitational field. However, this ignores the expansion of space, and the accompanying dilation of time, that occur as more mass is "sucked in" to the prospective area of space where a black hole is to form. Formation of a black hole would require enough mass to get sucked in that Schwarzschild's radius would exceed the radius of the mass at the center of the black hole. This won't happen though, because as more mass is sucked, space expands, and you get a singularity, not a center, with a perpetually collapsing mass that perpetually exceeds its receding but growing Schwarzschild's radius. The radius is receding in the sense that it is getting further from the periphery of the black hole (think of a sphere in near flat space sufficiently large to contain the ever collapsing mass and expanding space). It is growing however, as more and more mass gets sucked in. This sounds paradoxical, but only because we are unused to the notion of expanding space.
Of course, there is a small matter of mathematics involved.
Here, Larry Abrams points to an error (he claims) made by Hilbert that led to the first black hole prediction and considers other ideas about black holes:
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Abrams1989.pdf"
Does anyone know of a refutation of Abrams' arguments or of any convincing argument that black holes must exist that attempts to address the criticisms made by the anti-black-hole people?
I accepted this for a long time, but I recently came across a website that claims black holes cannot exist and provides references to a great many papers on the topic that don't seem at all to be the typical crackpot/crank material. (I must point out, however, that the website author appears to be a bit cranky, in the sense of "irritable about the issue", although not crackpotty.)
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com"
Intuitively, I understand the argument to be this: It seems obvious that black holes can exist, because, when you keep adding mass to a large mass, at some point the force of gravity will be so strong that even light cannot escape the gravitational field. However, this ignores the expansion of space, and the accompanying dilation of time, that occur as more mass is "sucked in" to the prospective area of space where a black hole is to form. Formation of a black hole would require enough mass to get sucked in that Schwarzschild's radius would exceed the radius of the mass at the center of the black hole. This won't happen though, because as more mass is sucked, space expands, and you get a singularity, not a center, with a perpetually collapsing mass that perpetually exceeds its receding but growing Schwarzschild's radius. The radius is receding in the sense that it is getting further from the periphery of the black hole (think of a sphere in near flat space sufficiently large to contain the ever collapsing mass and expanding space). It is growing however, as more and more mass gets sucked in. This sounds paradoxical, but only because we are unused to the notion of expanding space.
Of course, there is a small matter of mathematics involved.
Here, Larry Abrams points to an error (he claims) made by Hilbert that led to the first black hole prediction and considers other ideas about black holes:
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Abrams1989.pdf"
Does anyone know of a refutation of Abrams' arguments or of any convincing argument that black holes must exist that attempts to address the criticisms made by the anti-black-hole people?
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