Do Black Holes REALLY exist after all?

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WTF?!?!

Physics does not = Math.

About my previous post, it is about Laplace who said that knowing the initial conditions permit the knowledge of everything if the rules are known, and Godel incompleteness theorems that I made the error of mixing it with a so-called theory of everything which is not. I tried to edit my previous post not long after I posted it, but when I submitted the wrongplanet was down with a parsing error.

There's a theory that black holes are gateways for other universes. I will read the posts and not post unless I have something intelligent to say about black holes, because I don't know enough about them.

I read a lot of books on cosmology, however it is really impossible to deeply understand this topic without getting heavily into the math. The OP has posted an interesting link to a new idea that I don't think most of today's influential physicists agree with (maybe they will come to agree with it as time goes on, who knows). The issue of meshing quantum mechanics and general relativity is unresolved, and that prevents anyone from knowing what is going on inside of black holes.

One theory regarding information loss is that the information content of objects falling into a black hole is encoded in the event horizon. This led to the holographic principle which is fascinating in itself (it suggests the 3-D universe we experience may be a holographic projection of events playing out on a 2-D boundary surface far away):

"The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics... In the case of a black hole... [the theory is that] the informational content of all the objects which have fallen into the hole can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

I'm here. I just haven't contributed to Wrong Planet for a couple of weeks. The problem with a "Theory of everything" is that general relativity and quantum mechanics are mutually incompatible when you try to combine them even though both are well tested theories. General relativity is still a classical theory in the sense that it assumes that positions and momenta can be determined simultaneously, whereas quantum mechanics requires Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to hold true. The problem comes in because when one tries to quantize general relativity, it becomes a non-renormalizable quantum field theory, meaning that you inevitably end up with singularities where probabilities approach infinity.

However to quote Jim Gates "If quantum mechanics is supposed to apply everywhere and general relativity is supposed to apply everywhere, well you can't have two different everywheres".

Until a unified theory is formulated one uses the theory that fits the known facts best. For matters of gravitation one uses The General Theory of Relativity. For everything else, the Standard Model.

This is messy, but the real world is a messy place.

ruveyn

Yeah, the only problem is that GR does NOT work over very small distances, and the standard model can NOT handle gravitation, but guess what natural phenomenon combines the two (gravitation and small distances) into a theory smashing, infinity spitting machine?

Even so, when a high energy X-ray emitter is seen (using X-ray spectrum telescopes) located and in addition stars are seen orbiting around that location in Kepler orbits, the odds are 10:1 you have a black hole. There are times one must be practical and theoretically perfectionist. If something looks like a black hole and the stars around it think it is a black hole then it is a black hole.

ruveyn

I wasn't suggesting that black holes don't exist, or that we've never really found one, but that the theory completely screws up at the the center of the black hole, which isn't called the singularity for nothing.

Sol what? We cannot test our theories at a singularity. Our theories only count when we can test them.

ruveyn

yeah, but there was a time when people thought that it was impossible to ever know the chemical composition of the stars. But then again, a black hole would just spaghettify you before you got close enough. But wait, maybe they'll find some sort of black-hole spectroscopy. But GR says nothing can escape a black hole past the event horizon. But then there's hawking radiation. Perhaps we can use that or some other quantum effect (entanglement, maybe?) to retrieve information about the singularity...

And the someone invented a spectrascope. Problem solved.

We will have to wait for someone to invent a singularity tester. Don't hold your breath until it happens.

ruveyn

yup. It's still possible, though. I BET it'll use entanglement. Entangle two particles, throw one in the black hole, see what happens... if it didn't give any information on the singularity, it would probably teach us more about entanglement.

Stephen Hawking took some steps in that direction. See Hawking Radiation.

ruveyn

i know about hawking radiation; I'm pretty sure it's do to the fact that antiparticles are regular particles going back in time, and vice versa, not entanglement.

Antiparticles are basically normal particles but with their electric charges reversed (a positron is the antiparticle of an electron, with the same spin and mass, but positive charge instead of negative). As far as I know, nobody has theorized that antiparticles go backward in time, and the only way I know of that a particle could go backward in time is to go faster than light.