The Black Hole War: A Platonic Dialogue by MC Complete

Leonard:  That last post of yours was pretty wild.

Daniel:  Yeah, I thought you'd appreciate it.

Leonard:  Actually, I thought it was kind of misleading how you said that time goes slower near a gravitational collapse.  You know that time differences are relative.  If you were on the surface of a collapsing object, the collapse would not be slowing down at all.  The collapse is only slowing down relative to those far away from it.

Daniel:  Those far away from it, like you and me.  And everyone else.  I doubt there are any experimental physicists who are on location at a gravitational collapse.  And if there ever will be, they probably won't come back to tell the tale.  And if they do come back to tell the tale, then they definitely left before the collapse completed.  I could claim that just before a collapsing object reaches its own Schwarzschild event horizon, an angel appears out of nowhere, stops the collapse, and hands out Krembos.  Such a claim could never be disproven by any evidence.  Therefore, talk about what happens from the perspective of an observer near a collapsing object is totally unscientific.

Leonard:  Oh come on.  You know there's no angel handing out Krembos.

Daniel:  So maybe it's handing out Bambas.  Look, even if you claim, based on the theory alone, that gravitational collapse does complete from the perspective of an observer close to the collapse, any such observer would be living in a very different time frame than us.  We would have to put this time frame in our future, if not after the end of time.  When I say that black holes do not exist, I'm using the present tense.  In my present, and in the present of my audience, black holes do not exist.

Leonard:  You have a very interesting argument, but it doesn't square with the facts.  Black holes are not some speculative conjecture.  They're there.  We can see them.

Daniel:  By definition, we can't see them.  I mean, if they existed, which they don't.

Leonard:  Well, we can't see them with the naked eye, just like we can't see atoms with the naked eye.  But we have plenty of evidence that they're there.

Daniel:  Even wikipedia is careful enough to talk in terms of "black hole candidates", rather then "black holes", to discuss astronomical objects in the actual cosmic landscape.  Consider the following statement from wikipedia: "The evidence for stellar black holes strongly relies on the existence of an upper limit for the mass of a neutron star."  In other words, theoreticians have proven mathematically that, beyond a certain mass, an object must gravitationally collapse.  However, I am arguing that there are objects which are collapsing, that would become black holes if they had enough time to finish collapsing.  But there isn't enough time in the world.  So perhaps astronomy has evidence that there are objects that have exceeded this limit.  I argue that they have not shown that these objects are currently black holes, rather that these objects are in the process of collapsing.

Leonard:  Very clever Daniel.  Well, any day now we'll pick up some Hawking radiation, which will blow your argument clear out of the water.

Daniel:  Maybe, maybe not.  But I'm not holding my breath.

Some Things Really do Take Forever

The wikipedia article on black holes says, "It is now widely accepted that the center of every or at least nearly every galaxy contains a supermassive black hole."

Well, it's not accepted by me.

In fact, I don't think that any galaxy has any black holes of any mass.  I don't believe in black holes.  Here's why: black holes are created by gravitational collapse.  I think gravitational collapse takes forever.

Einstein taught us that gravity pulls time.  The stronger a gravitational field, the slower time moves.  And as an object gravitationally collapses toward being a black hole, its gravitational field is extremely strong.  Its strength approaches infinity.  Thus, the "speed" of time near the object approaches zero.  Which means that the collapse itself goes slower and slower.  And, I would argue, never actually "finishes" (finishes in the sense of creating a real black hole).

I've talked to some physicists about this.  There was a guy in the office who had a PhD in black hole studies.  So I asked him my question.  He couldn't really answer it, and eventually he got very annoyed with me.  (Then he transferred to the US.  I assume this had nothing to do with our conversation about black holes.)

I emailed Brian Greene about this, and he said, "Talk to me after you read Susskind's Intro to Black Holes."  So I put it on my reading list, but I haven't gotten around to it.  I guess I could have written back and told Greene that I'd already read Susskind's Black Hole War, but I didn't.