Why Pander to Singularities Anyway? (was Sol-like system discovered...SETI new directions?)

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 23:55:43 MDT

  • Next message: Ramez Naam: "RE: Why Pander to Singularities Anyway? (was Sol-like system discovered...SETI new directions?)"

    Anders writes

    > The stability of massive
    > stars is not dependent on the speed of gravity since it is a static
    > property (some complications for truly massive stars where relativistic
    > instability forces them to oscillate). When a star collapses to a black
    > hole it does so when the mass concentration inside a region becomes
    > larger than the Schwarzchild criterion; you could compress it or add
    > mass very slowly and still get a quick "schlurp" once the last atom
    > broke spacetime's back.

    Why do you believe in black holes? The only way that the
    math yields such things is through transforms that ultimately
    yield singularities (which should have been enough to convince
    people that the use of such mathematical transformations is
    extremely suspect).

    > (event horizons, being somewhat virtual and arbitrary things, can "move"
    > faster than light, such as when a non-axisymmetric black hole relaxes.

    We don't need to worry about it, if there aren't black holes.

    I am not a crackpot. :-) Consider the situation with an open
    mind: we know from the Schwarzchild view that (in effect) the
    passage of time slows near heavy mass concentrations. This
    might be worthless mathematical arcanae were it not for the
    convenient fact that indeed, just exactly as predicted from the
    use of the S equations and S coordinates, atomic events on the
    sun and on other massive bodies do proceed more slowly.

    So now imagine a body 2.5 times more massive than the sun---
    as it contracts, events begin to proceed VERRRRRY slowly, and
    a gigantic case of stellar constipation obtains. Near the
    center, it takes practically forever for anything to happen.

    (So the Russian theorists, I claim, were right about "frozen
    stars", and people in the sixties just fell under Wheeler's
    mesmerism, and began to think that black holes *already*
    existed, instead of happening only after infinitely much
    time has elapsed, and *only* if the object does not evaporate
    ---(it is thought by Hawking and others that these alleged
    black holes eventually evaporate)).

    My revisionist view then goes like this: since it takes
    practically forever for anything to happen in the center of
    a collapsed star, some *people* got impatient, and subjected
    the whole mess to a Kruskal-Szekeres transformation, and
    voila, we obtain some much more interesting and racy phenomena
    in the new coordinates.

    Never mind that the variable t referring to ordinary time needs
    to take on transfinite values---why should that stop a physicist
    with too much imagination, tenure, and too little common sense?
    It is so joyful to BELIEVE in black holes and singularities, event
    horizons, and all that fun stuff, never mind if they're real
    or not, or whether even after 10^10^10^10^10 years we'd ever
    actually have one.

    Lee



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 23 2003 - 00:04:09 MDT