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No Naked Black Holes
Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. Even in this extreme scenario, Roger Penrose's weak cosmic censorship hypothesis seems to hold — the resulting black hole (after the gravitational waves have died down) retains its event horizon. "Mathematically, 'naked' singularities, or those without event horizons, can exist, but physicists wouldn't know what to make of them. All known mechanisms for the formation of singularities also create an event horizon, and Penrose conjectured that there must be some physical principle — a 'cosmic censor' — that forbids singularity nakedness ..."
Does anyone else get sad at the thought that there are so many weird things in the universe you may not learn the answers to in your lifetime? What if everyone posting here never finds out the reason for the cosmic censor? Sort of depressing.
If photonst have weight, they can be effected by gravity, and a black hole can form around any object with sufficient mass to trap light. That's all there is to it. There is no magical singularity where the laws of physics break down. There doesn't need to be.
Heh... I knew who Roger Penrose was long before I heard of Richard Dawkins, and I suspect that I'll forget who Richard Dawkins soon enough. But I'm biased for being a physicist.
For some reason your reference reminds me of Hotel California.
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said we are all just prisoners here, of our own device
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
relax, said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!
The bolded portion bears the strongest relationship to black holes, but possible Christianity references abound. Maybe scientists should name some of them: Hotel California, purgatory, hell and call the one that gets us "the beast".
I can't get over this sort of story. "We programmed our INCOMPLETE understanding of the cosmos into this simulation, which tells us X, therefore X is more likely."
Anything based on a computer simulation is based on our arbitrarily incomplete knowledge. To base even the least significant conclusions upon it seems laughably irresponsible and unscientific.
But hey, I was a music major, so what do I know.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
-1, Unfalsifiable
Dare I elaborate, if you wanted to make up a generic unfalsifiable claim on purpose that's probably what you would come up with.
You just got troll'd!
You probably need to get yourself an extra few dimensions to make 3 particles collide exactly head-on.