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