From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 15:52:47 MDT
Damien writes (with satire turned-up to an unknown degree)
> Even if they don't exist, they make very pretty pictures in
> the sky. Get a load of the gorgeous thing in NGC4261 at...
I maintain only that the event horizons of this object and
other black holes have not *yet* formed, and there are as
yet *no* singularities over which to worry.
It's just a frozen star, as all the Russian scientists in
the 1950's would have told you.
But then along came Wheeler, and absolutely everyone who
reads Wheeler falls in love with his style, his ingeniousness,
and his imagination. The following is written in attempted
emulation of his unforgettable style:
1. Focus not on the Schwarzchild coordinates which
produce apparent singularities at r = 2M (the
radius at which exists the event horizon), where
t goes to infinity.
2. Instead, focus on the real physics of the falling
astronaut by whose own clock time does not slow
at all.
3. By mathematically transforming coordinates---which
one knows has no effect on true singularities but
which can remove apparent ones caused not by nature
but by poor choice of coordinate systems---conclude
that the falling astronaut's physics remain just as
do ours as he crosses the event horizon at a finite
time by the reading of his watch.
4. Conclude that the apparent difficulty in the S
coordinates represents nothing physical at R = 2M
and that there exists a true singularity at
R = 0, which characteristically CANNOT be removed
by mathematical transformations, it being intrinsic
to reality itself.
And speaking like this, though with vastly more eloquence,
with vastly more authority, and bolstered by extremely
imaginative and profound mathematical analysis, Wheeler
evidently brainwashed an entire generation of physicists,
apparently even including the Russians.
A physicist---I claim---will admit to you that there is
no latest time at which a photon from the astronaut could
be received by us, and that photon trajectories into and out
of black holes are symmetric. And yet that same physicist,
still under the thrall of Wheeler, will maintain that
event horizons "exist" and at the center of the black holes
singularities "exist" (they deliberately choose the present
tense).
Moreover, if Hawking radiation from a black hole exists,
and that they eventually evaporate, then a quantum of
radiation will be the last emitted from the black hole
at some unimaginable but finite period of time in the
future (say after 10^200 years). But this time is less
than the time that an idealized photon from an infalling
astronaut could be received on the outside, and so there
is a direct contradiction between the infinite time that
it would take an infalling astronaut to reach the event
horizon (in outside coordinates), and the finite time
(in outside coordinates) that the black hole emits its
last dying photon.
Surely there're have been other people who see through all
this besides just me.
Lee
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