Why Albert Einstein's Original Concept for a Black Hole?

[K. Doc Holiday]

Einstein-Rosen Bridge

Question: Why do we discard Albert's original concept for a black hole? I have one college astronomy textbook which doesn't even mention it. The only use seems to be in science fiction movies and books. Why?

Is it possible that he actually got it right conceptually but discarded it because his math was off?

Whenever I look at any other conceptual drawings of a black hole I notice something. They never have ALL the component parts: relativistic jets (plural), accretion disk and event horizon. And current theory is incapable of explaining the loss of "information" which violates the laws of quantum physics. Which seems like a problem. Isn't it?

On the other hand, if we assume Albert's original concept is correct these problems seem to disappear. Should we consider going back to the basics? Just asking.

Respectfully,
Doc Holiday

 

[russ_watters]

The problems don't actually disappear if you roll back history to when they hadn't been discovered yet.

 

[rootone]

Even if wormholes can actually exist, they would be very short lived, unstable, and microscopic in scale.
Not really a potential way of transporting people and other stuff

 

[phinds]

Whenever I look at any other conceptual drawings of a black hole I notice something. They never have ALL the component parts: relativistic jets (plural), accretion disk and event horizon.

Well, black holes don't have to HAVE an accretion disk. If they've laready sucked in everything around them, there is no accretion disk.

 

[Chronos]

A worm hole entrance is pretty easy to imagine. It appears useful to ask what a wormhole exit might look like. I don't believe any candidate examples have been identified.

 

[Vanadium 50]

hy do we discard Albert's original concept for a black hole?

Hey,. "Doc" (I put Doc in quotes because you never answered my question "what is your doctorate in" so I assume you are a pretend doc) this kind of undue and unnecessary familiarity is off-putting and doesn't actually help you make your case.

As it happens, Einstein did not invent the black hole. Classically, the idea goes back a century earlier to Laplace. The modern black hole's key property - the event horizon - was first understood in 1958, 3 years after Einstein's death. He also didn't really invent the wormhole in the paper with Rosen. That paper was more about the sort of properties charged particles can have in GR without leading to mathematical trouble. In 1962 Wheeler showed that this isn't a wormhole solution in the normal sense, in that the wormhole cannot last long enough for anything to traverse it.

 

[PeterDonis]

Why do we discard Albert's original concept for a black hole?

What "original concept" are you referring to?

 

[Dale]

Albert's original concept for a black hole

I also don’t know what you are referring to here. Can you provide a citation or a link?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Isn't he talking about the Einstein-Rosen bridge (title, first line)?

 

[Dale]

You could be right, but it hardly seems like a discarded concept. It is well known and frequently discussed.

 

[PeterDonis]

Isn't he talking about the Einstein-Rosen bridge (title, first line)?

If he is, he is mistaken in thinking that it was "Albert's original concept for a black hole" which was then "discarded". AFAIK there was no such thing. So we need the OP to clarify what he is actually interested in talking about: is it the Einstein-Rosen bridge, or is it the nonexistent (unless the OP can provide a reference) "Albert's original concept for a black hole which was then discarded"? Or is it something more like "what component parts does a black hole have", or is it the black hole information loss problem?

I agree the thread title is what it is, but I see nothing whatever in the actual substance of the OP that refers to it, and several other things that appear (possibly) to be referred to in the OP. Rather than try to guess what the OP actually is interested in, I'd like him to tell us.

 

[PeterDonis]

he is mistaken in thinking that it was "Albert's original concept for a black hole" which was then "discarded".

Just to clarify the actual history of the Einstein-Rosen bridge concept: neither Einstein nor Rosen had anything to do with discovering it. The maximally extended Schwarzschild geometry was not discovered until the late 1950's; not until after that geometry was understood was the presence of the "wormhole" now called the Einstein-Rosen bridge in it understood. The "wormhole" in that solution was named after Einstein and Rosen because of a 1935 paper they published which proposed a modified theory of gravity (i.e., a different field equation from GR) which would allow static "wormhole" solutions with normal matter only, which were hypothesized to represent elementary particles. These solutions had no event horizons (Einstein never accepted the possibility of event horizons) and were not black holes.

 

[alantheastronomer]

(Einstein never accepted the possibility of event horizons)

I thought Einstein never accepted the possibility of singularities...Did Schwarzschild accept the possibility of event horizons?

 

[PeterDonis]

I thought Einstein never accepted the possibility of singularities

He never accepted those either, as far as I know. But he also never accepted event horizons; he published at least two papers in the 1930s making arguments for why a gravitational collapse could never result in an event horizon.

Did Schwarzschild accept the possibility of event horizons?

I don't think he was aware of the possibility inherent in his solution. He died on the Eastern Front in WW I only a few months after sending his paper to Einstein.

 

[alantheastronomer]

He never accepted those either, as far as I know. But he also never accepted event horizons; he published at least two papers in the 1930s making arguments for why a gravitational collapse could never result in an event horizon.
I don't think he was aware of the possibility inherent in his solution. He died on the Eastern Front in WW I only a few months after sending his paper to Einstein.

Do you know when the first time the concept of an event horizon was conceived of, or found in the literature? I noticed that Vanadium 50 mentioned 1958, three years after Einstein died. Did Wheeler come up with it?

 

[PeterDonis]

Do you know when the first time the concept of an event horizon was conceived of, or found in the literature?

The Oppenheimer-Snyder 1939 paper on gravitational collapse described it, but that clue wasn't followed up for another couple of decades.

 

[robphy]

Visual Horizons in World Models
W Rindler
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/116.6.662
01 December 1956

This paper seeks to effect a unification and generalization of various particular results on visual horizons scattered in the literature. A horizon is here defined as a frontier between things observable and things unobservable. Two quite different types of horizon exist which are here termed event-horizons and particle-horizons. These are discussed in detail and illustrated by examples and diagrams. The examples include well-known model-universes which exhibit one or the other type of horizon, both types at once, or no horizon. Proper distance and cosmic time are adopted as the main variables, and the analysis is based on the Robertson-Walker form of the line element and therefore applies to all cosmological theories using a homogeneous and isotropic substratum.

Rindler cites a 1924 work by Eddington using “mass-horizon”.
Weyl wrote a 1921 article using the term “mass-horizon”. https://www.nature.com/articles/106800a0.pdf

I haven’t read any of these in detail to see if they actually refer to the event horizon.

 

[PeterDonis]

Rindler cites a 1924 work by Eddington using “mass-horizon”.
Weyl wrote a 1921 article using the term “mass-horizon”

This term appears to refer to a property of the Einstein static universe cosmology, not the event horizon in Schwarzschild spacetime.

 

[Vanadium 50]

The paper I am using as the birthday of the event horizon is Finkelstein "Past-Future Asymmetry of the Gravitational Field of a Point Particle", Phys. Rev. 110 (1958) 965-7. While there was work on this topic before and since, this is the paper that identified the Schwarzschild Radius with the Event Horizon for an uncharged non-rotating black hole.