Re: Olber again (was: Re: Big Bang is Bunk)

From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Jul 31 2001 - 17:01:27 MDT


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Miriam English wrote:
>
> At 11:04 AM 31/07/2001 -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> >Miriam English wrote:
> > > If matter is crushed out of existence then it doesn't collect.
> >
> >This is another one of the ignorant 'free lunch' claims that can't pan
> >out. Matter that falls into a black hole isn't 'crushed out of
> >existence'. Its mass adds to the gravitational field of the black hole.
> >Thus in a universe of infinite age, some proportion of black holes would
> >have infinite mass, and would thus cause the infinite universe to
> >destroy itself.
>
> Tch tch tch. Mike, this is a pretty strong (not to mention insulting) claim
> to make when talking about something which is still theoretical. Nobody has
> actually even seen a black hole in action yet as far as I know.

Actually, Hawking's theoretical work predicted just the sort of
phenomena you would see to observe a black hole, and several have been
observed, including at least one galaxy core black hole.

> We are
> pretty damn sure they exist and are at the heart of most(?) galaxies, but I
> don't think we yet have any direct evidence that they even exist, let alone
> certainty about what goes on inside them. Sure, we can extrapolate the laws
> of physics as we know them and hope that they hold up inside such beasts,
> but we can't really say what happens under such extreme conditions.
>
> But, I wasn't actually saying that matter *is* crushed out of existence
> inside black holes, it was an *if*. I was simply posing speculative
> possibilities in response to your earlier hasty post.

Well, you can should yourself all over the place, but that doesn't mean
you're actually saying anything. We are allegedly arguing over whether
our universe is steady state or big bang. I say the lack of infinite
size black holes indicates we don't live in an infinite universe....



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