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Black Holes 'Do Not Exist,' Contends Physicist
SpaceAdmiral writes "Nature reports that, according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, 'It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist.' George Chapline argues that the collapse of massive stars is more likely to lead to dark energy stars. These dark energy stars behave somewhat like a black hole outside of the surface, but the negative gravity inside could cause matter to 'bounce back out again.'"
In other news, donuts almost certainly don't exist. Instead it is much more likely that there exists circular pieces of cooked dough with a hole in the centre.
Crackpottery would be saying something is true and then saying everything must conform to that. Science doesn't work like that. You have a bunch of data, and you make a theory that best fits the evidence. Or you make a theory that makes some prediction. That theory remains valid until some piece of data is uncovered that does not fit in with the theory, at which point the theory is modified.
Right now, black holes are what seem to fit observations and theory. If we get more data (perhaps what this article is referring to) that does not conform, then the theory will change with it.
Thats not crackpottery, thats the way its supposed to work. There is no such thing as a 'final' theory. Its a process.
Preach it brother! And add to that list time dialation, length dialation, non simultaneity, spontaneous quantum particle creation, particle smearing, the particle-wave duality, 2-slit experiments, splitting atoms, bowling balls and feathers falling at the same speeds, and the earth being round. Crackpottery, all.
Geez, just because you don't understand it doesn't make it wrong. Weirder stuff has already been proven.
The ______ Agenda
Wow, are we applying PHB standards to an already politicized world of science? Are you in the college text business or something? Whatever happened to the most elegant and simplist solution being the likely right explaination?
What is "true science?". Science is a process, not a result. Things that turned out to be wrong, like phlogiston or ether, aren't necessarily bad science, they are still part of the process.
They were disproved, and lead to better (as in having more accurate predictive power) theories. Black Holes are extrapolations of existing theories that seem good (like General Relativity), so they shouldn't be dismissed unless we can disprove them or come up with a better theory.
That, after all, is science.
Who modded this insightful? Probably someone who's never been to a conference...
Take a look at the header - this was submitted to a conference, *not* a full peer-reviewed journal. Many conferences (I know for sure most IEEE conferences are like this) limit paper submissions to 4 pages. URSI (Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale - they're just like IEEE Antennas and Propigation Society, with mostly the same members and co-host their conference) papers are even limited to 1 page for their conference. *Conference* papers really more discussion points than full blown "proofs". I'd suspect he'd follow this up with an "official" paper in one of their peer-reviewed journals.
At one time most people thought the world was flat, including many scientists. Yet, a proof that the world was round could easily be written on 4 pages. The proof for Fermat's last theorem took many pages to prove, yet disproving it (if it had turned out to be wrong) could be done in one line, by filling in values for x,y, and z for the equation x^n + y^n = z^n. Sometimes disproving something is much more trivial than proving something.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's fairly incontrovertable that there *are* objects in the universe with gravity so intense that light can't escape them (at least visible light), but as for what actually happens at the 'event' horizon, it's all a guess. Gravastars, Dark Energy stars, and Black Holes all would look about the same in a radio telescope. There's no reason this can't be true.
Besides, uninformed dismissal based on previous works is what put Galileo in the pokey. Proper management of a paper like this would be to determine an experiment and examine the results.
Cygnus XR-1 is a good example of such an object. Do we know for certain that it's a black hole. Well no, we don't. Perhaps there are other classes of objects out there that can produce similar effects, which is what I believe this fellow is saying. Nothing wrong with coming up with alternate solutions. That's what science is all about. There was a time when Hawkings and Penrose were causing stirs in the establishment, and it seems only right that now that they are establishment, that a scientist comes along to challenge them. It's all about the evidence, so we'll see if what this fellow says survives scrutiny.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Whenever, over the ages, science seems to get too complicated, the usual answer is that it has gone off in a tangent. Most of the best theories have been elegantly simple at explaining our observations. These "discoveries" when proposed were considered revolutionary ideas. Later, when they were developed they usually were over-complicated by trying to explain everything. That's when a revolution in simplification happened and the process began from nearly scratch. Think of what happened to Keplerians' formulas and Newton's idea of gravity. They are still used today, even though they are wrong, and have been supplanted by Einstein's Theory of Gravity, because the models of Newton & Kepler are very accurate. Better yet: look at the models offered by geo-centric solar system projections. Here is one really nice animation: http://catholicoutlook.com/images/movingsolar7.gif
The idea is that once it gets too complicated all of the evolutionary ideas that get developed are probably causing more harm to the original thesis. Although the original work did a great job of explaining a certain observation when new data was added the theory had to expanded to a level of undue complexity to have weight. Then a competing and revolutionary idea was developed, seemed to match the data, and the process began anew.
I guess it's getting time for a powerful new theory. One that will get ruined in the future, since we really know so little.
There are no sacred cows in science (or at least there shouldn't be). I'm not defending the guy, as I'm not a physicist and couldn't begin to. A lot of very bright guys have worked on black holes, and it's very damn rare that any theory in science gets tossed out lock, stock and barrel. It's quite likely that there will be some flaw found in this fellow's alleged falsification. It's a sign of healthy research that scientists try to throw stones through even reasonably well established theories. Even if they're completely wrong, it forces other scientists to more clearly ponder those theories.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes, but don't forget that Black Holes were PREDICTED to exist, in theory, before some of the (probable) black holes were actually measured by radiotelescopes (I says measured and not "seen").
What I'd like to see is a physical equation saying that the theoretical predictions on black holes are WRONG.
If he can't prove with equations that Black Holes don't exist, then his theory is flawed. Of course, he could prove that dark energy stars DO exist. But from that to saying that ALL black holes don't...
While I would hate to disagree with Stephen Hawking, he would seem to be in disagreement with most modern philosophers of science. A single observation can only disprove a theory if you know that observation to be definitively true -- but any observation you make hinges on a theory as well, e.g. the theory that "what I see in this microscope is a big version of what's really there, and not distorted in some substantial way." An observation that disagrees with a theory could instead disprove the theory that says you're seeing what you think you're seeing.