Zeeya Merali
What I find most interesting about this work is not the claim that black holes might not exist, but the fact that every time we attempt to follow gravitational collapse all the way to its most extreme conclusion, some mechanism seems to emerge that prevents us from getting there.
First there was the singularity, which many physicists regard as a sign that the theory has reached the limits of its validity. Then came the information paradox. Now we have proposals in which Hawking radiation itself alters the collapse process before an event horizon can fully form.
Perhaps the real question is not whether Mersini-Houghton's calculations are ultimately correct in every detail. Perhaps the deeper question is why nature appears to resist the formation of these extreme states again and again.
Sometimes I wonder whether we have been interpreting black holes backwards.
What if black holes are not physical objects that nature readily produces, but instead the result of extrapolating our equations into a regime where our current descriptions become incomplete?
After all, we have never directly observed a singularity. We have never directly observed a perfectly defined event horizon. What we observe are extremely compact objects whose behavior agrees remarkably well with our theoretical predictions.
This raises a question that I find difficult to ignore:
What if the true lesson of black holes is not that the Universe contains infinite and inaccessible regions, but that there exists a fundamental limit to what our current theories are capable of describing?
