• Cosmology
  • Black Holes Do Not Exist, claims Mersini-Houghton

Thanks Steve,

See my comments below about the gravitational radius defining a sphere containing a parcel of time, in relation to the Matter-Time discussion, the subject of duration, persistence of objects in time - and so on.

All the Best,

Jonathan

IMOTS should be..

Inner Marginally Trapped Outer Surfaces, is the proper long form. Ellis and colleagues assert that this is the innermost layer of a Black Hole's horizon and that it is purely time-like. And my generalization is that the gravitational radius of any mass-bearing object likely defines a sphere containing only time, and being outside of space or having no interior to speak of.

All the Best,

Jonathan

It's not my business to deal with black holes. I agree with Jonathan Dickau only on that what I consider speculations about the universe as a whole are interrelated.

Please forgive me uttering my perhaps unwelcome doubt whether there are at all actual singularities and any actual infinity in the real world. Isn't history of ideas for a created and somehow complete world is a record of tenets that were proved untenable or at least seemingly rescued by means of adapted and again adapted hypotheses?

When engineers like me enjoy calculating with fictitious singularities, we never imagine them something physical real.

Eckard

    There's a very nice survey of conservation of information on Physics Stack Exchange, by one of our FQXi brethren, Cristi Stoica.

    Tom,

    I'm not trying to be presumptuous, but my interest is not so much in the more arcane details of physics and math, but how it applies to the dynamic, social and natural reality in which we exist. One in which something like half of all wildlife species have disappeared in the last forty years.

    That is what I consider information. As I recall, various of the entries in our recent contest dealt with how to preserve such genetic and cultural information.

    There really is a reality outside the classroom and study.

    Regards,

    John M

    " ... interest is not so much in the more arcane details of physics and math ..."

    Then I'm curious as to why you choose to be prolific on a site where arcane details of physics and math are staples. Heck, maybe it's I who is in the wrong room.

    Jonathan,

    If I may explain my cyclical system with a simplistic analogy, it would be a factory.

    Now on a very basic level, the product goes one direction, from start to finish, while the process points the other direction, consuming raw material and expelling finished product. Now this process consumes a lot of material and energy and creates a lot of excess, other than the final product. This is not all waste. Not only can much of it be recycled, but for a factory, much of the excess is the purpose it exists, from profits for the owners and investors, to jobs for the workers and on that level, it is actually the product that is incidental. So then when we extend this dynamic out to the larger world, there are all these feedback loops wrapping around in everything. Populations are a constant dynamic of individuals being born, growing up and old, then dying, much like the product moving through the factory, as the species moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Meanwhile the whole purpose of this process is the experiences of those people, pushing out on the limits which ultimately define them. Otherwise known as feedback.

    Then consider this dynamic in terms of a galaxy and the same pattern is at work. Mass and structure start to coalesce on the fringes and be drawn in, becoming ever more dense, complex and structured, all the while shedding back out enormous amounts of energy, all through the process. Until eventually even the hardest forms fall into the vortex at the center and are ejected out across the universe as light and material with sufficient momentum to feed other processes, or to fall back into the host galaxy as another feedback loop.

    'Time is the Image of Eternity.'

    Yet also consider that if time is actually a measure of action and change, then it is the present in which this activity occurs, that is eternal. Consider the projection of duration. Really it is the state of this present, as those particular events that are used to measure time, are forming and dissolving. It is just that while our consciousness only exists in the present, our thoughts are focused on these circumstances which are occurring.

    Consciousness is. Thoughts are its action. I am, therefore I think.

    Regards,

    John M

    Jonathon,

    ...and the Lost Particle of Time.

    use it if you like :-) jrc

    Akinbo,

    The surface of last scattering is wherever that light emanates from, be it the sun, stars and planets, or the walls of the room and the people in it, that provide us with the information about them. Now this background radiation has no such apparent source of "last scattering," other than some primordial state that seems to radiate from the furtherest reaches of space. It was then argued that this was that glow from the initial "Big Bang." Since clarified as the stage where electron and protons combined and allowed light to propagate.

    Yet if one were to consider a steady state model, in which redshift is an optical effect, there would be a very logical explanation for exactly this sort of radiation. Since light is eventually redshifted completely of the visible spectrum, then any radiation emanating from sources beyond that particular horizon line would be just what we see, black body microwaves, propagating from the edges of the visible universe.

    In fact, there is an old question, called Olber's paradox, that was used to argue that the universe couldn't be infinite, since eventually every point in our perception of the night sky would eventually reach another star and nothing stopped the light, why isn't the entire sky lit up by these infinite sources of light? So this radiation is just that, the light from infinite sources, growing ever fainter, flatter and thus redder.

    Regards,

    John M

    Tom,

    Believe it or not, but even the field of physics doesn't exist in isolation.

    The fact is that complexity and simplicity are often sides of a larger cycle, expansion/consolidation, creation/destruction, etc, so understanding complex situation means being able to step back and sense where the energy flowing through them is going and that is the signal that will have the most effect. Much of what happens on the surface is just noise.

    There is a lot of noise in politics and a fair amount in the various fields of physics.

    Regards,

    John M

    • [deleted]

    It is not unwelcome..

    To point out that many of the infinities and singularities appearing in the Maths indicate that our model is showing us that something is unphysical, is certainly germane to this conversation. Dr. Mitra's main thrust is that we cannot just ignore when various Math quantities go to infinity, and must examine the Physics there more carefully.

    I think the 'no drama' scenario, where an event horizon is viewed purely as a 'coordinate singularity' that has no physical meaning is rather naive. In my opinion; it is absolutely reasonable that we ask why does the Jacobian diverge at the horizon, or what do the infinities mean, rather than simply making them go away by applying a coordinate transformation.

    While sometimes we can normalize discontinuities away, just by knowing the value things converge to, we can't automatically assume they don't exist, just because our Math lets us do this.

    All the Best,

    Jonathan

    What happens if some dark matter falls into a black hole? I envision dark matter as being on a separate Higgs field, possibly one with a faster speed of light, let's call it c'. I'm pretty sure that if c' > c, then the event horizon of this other Higgs field/faster Higgs will be inside of the "c" event horizon and will have a smaller radius.

    In the extreme case, if the black hole was completely made of dark matter, we wouldn't be able to tell other than the fact that a dark matter black hole might not emit radiation. The question would than be: is there any way that the two Higgs fields might connect and exchange energy?

    Since my poorly understood physical consequence of the theory of gravity explains galaxy rotation without dark matter, it seems interesting for the large scale structure of spacetime.

    "I don't know what a quantomologist is, though it is quite evident that your ad hoc assumption of quantum gravity brings with it a number of other ad hoc assumptions that do not correspond to what we know about the large scale structure of spacetime:"

    What I have are not ad hoc assumptions, they are just "poorly understood physical consequences of the theory of gravity," i.e. the poorly understood impact of the quantization of gravity force.

    Excuse me?

    "I agree most 'fit' findings to theory. Call me contrary but I do the opposite."

    Most theories agree with findings. The luminosity curve is the findings. The theory would agree with the luminosity curve, the findings do not change.

    Show me a luminosity curve that results from a recycling model and let's see how it agrees or not with the findings.

    I can now understand why you are enamored with infinity.

    "Wouldn't overall recycling necessarily be occurring on the galactic level, with these stellar mass objects gradually falling inward. How much literature is out there in fitting observations onto an infinite time frame, rather than all trying to squeeze everything into 13.8 billion years?"

    Look, all I was trying to show is that the current data do not show galaxy radiation anywhere nearly intense enough to support much recycling. You can always find a way by introducing some strange new particle or invisible recycling or whatever. But you do need to make the numbers work.

    Luminosity is energy versus time...without a constant time interval, luminosity will scale with that time. This quasar luminosity curve has the Hubble time base built in and that is why I have plotted it versus time past.

    The problem with infinite space is much the same as with black holes in the first place. As soon as you introduce singularities into a model, just about anything can be modeled since there is always a free constant in whatever renormalization you choose.

    Look, we got the universe that what we got. Either we can understand what we got with math, or we will simply go on talking about why we do not understand it.

    And of course, as well as a plot of space time, here is a plot of quasar number and luminosity in a decaying matter time universe. Since c, alpha, and h all scale with time, the Hubble red shift turns into a blue shift of red spectra for a shrinking universe. Note that now quasar luminosity is more like the present epoch and so this means that there is simply a shift between star luminosity and SMBH luminosity over time.

    quasar numbers and luminosities

    Dear All,

    Let us assume either semi-classical gravity or QG does affect gravitational collapse. But the radius of a BHC of 1 solar mass is ~ 3 km and which is not a microscopic object at all. The radius of a 1 million solar mass BHC is ~ 3 million km, again which is not at all any quantum object. Also if one would think of QG effect, note, the strength of gravity is supposed to be given by tidal forces (Kretschmann Scalar) which is is not large enough for even 1 solar mass BHC. Further its value decreases as M^{-4} and could be arbitrarily small for sufficiently massive BHCs. Therefore the problem of formation of astrophysical BHCs is certainly a classical GR problem. And the research carried out by me (and few others) have shown that

    1. There cannot be any finite mass BHs, and all BHCs must be something else.

    2. This ``something else'' is most likely to be ECOs/MECOs because of the dramatic increase of radiation trapping by self-gravity for z>>1. This are generic effects and should be present in all QG introduction as well.

    3. QG effect, if any, must further resist formation of BHs.

    4. Some authors needed to invoke mysterious properties of the collapsing fluid like formation of ``Dark Energy'' or transformation from the regime of POSITIVE pressure to NEGATIVE pressure. Since astrophysical BHCs are classical objects, such effects even if assumed to be true must be negligible compared to be GENERIC radiation trapping effect.

    Thus we could have formally bade farewell to BH paradigm long before the erroneous paper of Laura.

    Regards

    Abhas

    OBSERVATION EVIDENCES FOR THIS PICTURE That Astrophysical BHCs/MCOs are MECOs

    If the BHCs are ECOs, which is much more compact than typical Neutron Stars and horizonless, they are expected to possess INTRINSIC magnetic field (B) much stronger than that of neutron stars. Indeed, way back in 2002, in a pioneering paper,

    Ref 1. ``Evidence for Intrinsic Magnetic Moments in Black Hole Candidates''

    The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 565, Issue 1, pp. 447-454 (2002); http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102381

    Robertson & Leiter showed that the so-called BHs in the X-Ray binaries may be explained as ultramagnetized ECOs. Later the name Magnetospheric ECOs or MECOs were invented. Later these authors went on strengthening this idea in several other important peer reviewed papers in top journals:

    Ref 2. On Intrinsic Magnetic Moments in Black Hole Candidates

    Astrophysical Journal, Volume 596, L203-L206 (2003); http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310078

    Ref 3. On the origin of the universal radio-X-ray luminosity correlation in black hole candidates:

    Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 350, 1391 (2004); http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0402445

    In 2006, almost direct (by astrophysical standards) evidence was presented that the BHC in the most well studied quasar is a MECO:

    Ref 4. Observations Supporting the Existence of an Intrinsic Magnetic Moment inside the Central Compact Object within the Quasar Q0957+561

    Schild, Rudolph E.; Leiter, Darryl J.; Robertson, Stanley L.: Astronomical Journal, 132, 420 (2006); http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505518

    Here is the link for Center for Astrophysics, Harvard, press release on this pioneering research: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/tuna/past/2006/NEW_QSO_STRUCTURE_FOUND.pdf

    Later it was found that many other quasars are likely to possess MECOs rather than BHs as their central engines:

    Ref. 5. Schild, Rudolph E.; Leiter, Darryl J.; Robertson, Stanley L.:

    ``Direct Microlensing-Reverberation Observations of the Intrinsic Magnetic Structure of Active Galactic Nuclei in Different Spectral States: A Tale of Two Quasars''

    Astronomical Journal, 135, 947-956 (2008); http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2422

    Ref. 6. Lovegrove, Justin; Schild, Rudolph E.; Leiter, Darryl.: Discovery of universal outflow structures above and below the accretion disc plane in radio-quiet quasars'

    Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 412, 2631-2640 (2011).

    Thus the idea that the BHCs are ECOs/MECOs have excellent observational support unlike any other hypothesis.

    Regards

    Abhas

      Steve,

      Below I give a conceptual basis for my understanding of recycling to Jonathan, at Oct. 2, 2014 @ 23:10.

      So does this fully apply at the astrophysical level? Maybe. How can I even fully prove it on the scales I use as examples? There might be guardian angels pulling strings from some other dimension. Which, at times, I'm not fully convinced there are not.

      As it is, most of reality seems to be energy propagating in all sorts of feedback loops, some enormous and some quite small. The both largest and most elemental would be that of radiation/energy and mass/order.

      Even the guardian angels as feedback loops, otherwise known as karma.

      Is infinity a free parameter? I don't really see why not. Now we have multivereses to fill in for it. As I see it, horizon lines would be the more reasonable solution.

      Regards,

      John M