Re: New Theories Dispute the Existence of Black Holes

[Jack Uretsky <jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV>]

        But the paper does not claim the non-existence of Black holes.
What it does do is claim another solution to the Einstein
equations that can simulate some of the effects of a black hole.  What
the authors seem to be doing is making a model where a collapsing star
collapses into a spherical shell rather than simply shriveling into a
volume that eventually recedes inside an event horizon.  The spherical
shell is located at the radius that would correspond to the event horizon
for the star's mass.  Their claim seems to be that this mode of collapse
evades the Chandrasekhar limit.
        It would be interesting to see whether this "shell game model"
is subject to buckling instability when it accretes matter (and is subject
to gravitational forces) from nearby companions.
        The quoted article seems to confuse the concepts of "event
horizon" and the singularity inside the event horizon.  That singularity
is intrinsically unobservable, and a mathematical demonstration that it is
somehow "softened", whether by quantum mechanics or otherwise, would be
interesting, but hardly significantly earth-shaking
(to those outside of the event horizon).
                                        Regards,
                                                Jack

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, Robert B Zannelli wrote:

> In a message dated 1/20/02 2:19:04 PM Eastern Standard Time, jlu@HEP.ANL.GOV
> writes:
>
> << This posting, apparently cribbed from the magazine "New Scientist"
>  contains enough inaccurate "spin" to be worthy of an Anderson accountant.
>  Here is the abstract from the actual paper (which, at 4 pp., isn't much
>  longer than the extravagant posting):
>          See gr-qc/0109035 in the ArXiV.  I am not copying the original
>  posting. >>
> Sorry about all the spin Jack. I wasn't aware that Mazur and Mottola had
> submitted an abstract to the ArXiv. Nevertheless the possibility, however
> remote, that Black holes may not exist might be viewed as fairly interesting
> news. Important ideas like Hawking radiation, Unruh effect and the
> Holographic principal would be in jeopardy not to mention the far more
> speculative ideas of Smolin. I hope there will be a more detailed reaction to
> this news than a comment on the spin content of what I posted, however
> deserved that was.
>
> Bob Zannelli

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