UNC Prof Proves Black Holes Don’t Exist
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(Newser) Massive stars don’t just fade away, they collapse into black holes, right? Even non-scientists have at least a vague notion of these mysterious forces of nature out there in deep space. Well, sorry to spoil everybody’s fun, but a physics professor at the University of North Carolina says she can prove that black holes can’t exist, reports UNC.edu.
Short version: The math doesn’t work, writes Laura Mersini-Houghton in a paper at ArXiv. “I’m still not over the shock,” she says. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.” Big caveat: Papers in the online collection at ArXiv have not been peer-reviewed. But if Mersini-Houghton is correct, some fundamental assumptions about the Big Bang will be called into question.
She agrees that huge stars eventually collapse under the weight of their own gravity and, as Stephen Hawking has shown, emit radiation as they do so. But her calculations suggest that in shedding this radiation, a star also sheds so much mass that it loses the ability to turn into a black hole. Collapsing stars “probably blow up” instead, concludes her paper, which is supported by calculations from an expert in something called numerical relativity at the University of Toronto. Expect pushback from physicists and laymen alike for two main reasons, writes Jason Major at Universe Today: First, “the popularity of black holes in our astronomical culture,” and second, “the many—scratch that; the countless—observations that have been made on quite black hole-ish objects found throughout the Universe.” Learn how to make a black hole.
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I simply cannot accept this as science. No doubt the author of the work is well-intentioned but publications that are not peer reviewed lack any semblance of credibility in the scientific or academic world.
The most fascinating part of this are the many implications of our being so “wrong” up to this point. It isn’t just the fact that much of physics is built on the concepts that are underpinned by a physics that includes black holes. It’s also that our “cultural” understanding of the universe, and the efficacy of science, could be upended to an unimaginable degree.
If you consider the impacts in history, the evolution from geocentric to heliocentric to relativity and beyond has happened in a pre-mass-communication, pre-internet world. News spread slowly and trickled down to “the masses’ over years or decades. Revolutionary news was absorbed and integrated into the general consciousness slowly. If generally (and widely) accepted understanding of black hole theory were to be disproved today, the shock wave on human perception would be enormous and virtually instant.
The political, social and educational implications would be staggering. Imagine, for example, the leverage climate-change deniers could apply to that debate simply by citing this which would undermine the credibility of science. The costs, on many fronts, could be massive.
The “truth” is the truth, so I would embrace whatever discovery that leads us to that truth, but for an investigation of this type to so overwhelmingly upend the foundations of current science would be a rather awesome thing to behold…awesome in the way a super-volcano is awesome.
Jim I am captured by this latest piece of “evidence.” You are so right about the implications. For science this would the ultimate paradigm shift, and no doubt there would be social consequences. Oh. Before I forget: big fan of super-volcanoes as well.