From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2003 - 16:03:28 MDT
Ramez wrote
> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Ramez Naam
> Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:15 PM
>
> From: Lee Corbin
> > 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).
>
> People said that about imaginary number results in other
> transformations before the discovery of the positron.
Do you mean the way that imaginary numbers were believed
not to exist? (I'm unsure what transformations you may
be talking about.) Well ever since Cardano and Ferrari,
complex numbers have been useful to obtain answers to
real problems. And I will concede the existence of the
*mathematical* objects:
Of course, I have no argument with the purely mathematical
research behind Kruskal-Szekeres transformations and what
not. It merely seems apparent to me that we shouldn't think
of them meaning anything physically, just as we totally ignore
the imaginary components in many other physics problems (to
pursue your analogy), e.g., in some electrodynamics.
Even if someday K-S transformations (or any others that lead
to black holes) have a practical use---as in providing us
methods to calculate physics answers in ordinary N+1 space
(that is, N dimensions and one time dimension), then even
still, why would we *believe* in the existence *now*, of
things like black holes, which, so far as I can see, really
occur (if ever) only after the passage in a real star of
infinitely much time?
Lee
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