High School Physicist who Questioned Black Holes

[jedishrfu]

This is an article about the Indian physicist, Abhas Mitra, who questioned the theory of black holes and the loss of information long before Prof Hawking agreed that there is no Hawking radiation, no exact event boundary and no black hole information paradox.

“In my 2000 paper, I pointed out the fact that experimental physicists had failed to find any evidence for Hawking Radiation, and I predicted neither will be there any such evidence in [the] future because there could not be any exact horizon, any exact black hole in the first place,” the 62-year-old told Quartz in an email. “Accordingly, I exerted that there is really no Black Hole Information Paradox.”

https://qz.com/1229007/abhas-mitra-...ed-stephen-hawkings-theory-about-black-holes/

 

[Arman777]

You can find the article here

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9910408

 

[jedishrfu]

And his bio on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhas_Mitra

 

[mathman]

Black holes have been found, especially at galactic centers were they are huge - millions or billions of solar masses. As for detecting Hawking radiation, that would be extremely difficult since the amount is extremely small.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

estimate\ 9\times 10^{-29} \ W for a black hole of 1 solar mass. It gets smaller for larger black holes.

 

[JMz]

I seem to recall that Bekenstein challenged the information paradox (that is, a seeming contradiction) as well, in the 1980s, and eventually persuaded Hawking what the answer to the paradox was.