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Black Hole

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Wikipedia Dispute: wikipedia:Black hole

This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Black hole


A black hole is, on the standard account, a region of spacetime in which gravitation is so strong that no matter and no light can escape from it. It is bounded by an event horizon, a one-way surface at which the escape speed is said to equal the speed of light, and it is held to contain at its centre a singularity — a point or ring of infinite density at which the known laws of physics cease to apply. Black holes are today part of the standard furniture of astrophysics: they are said to form when massive stars collapse, to sit in supermassive form at the centres of most galaxies, and to have been detected by the gravitational waves given off when two of them merge.

The literature collected on this wiki does not accept that account, and the black hole is probably the sharpest single point of disagreement between the researchers documented here and mainstream astrophysics. The objection is unusual in its form. It is not, in the main, that the observations have been misread — though that charge is made too — but that the object itself is a mathematical artefact: that the solution of Einstein's field equations from which the black hole was extracted does not contain one, and that the theory in which it is said to live forbids it. As Stephen John Crothers puts the position, "there is no black hole in Schwarzschild's solution. Indeed, his solution precludes the black hole, and for this reason he never spoke of the black hole."

This article sets out the mainstream account first, then the history of the idea as the critics reconstruct it, then the dispute over the Schwarzschild solution, over singularities and horizons, over the observational claims and over the gravitational-wave detections, and finally the alternative models of compact objects proposed in the archive.

The mainstream account

The case should be stated accurately before it is criticised.

In general relativity a spherically symmetric mass produces, in the vacuum region outside it, a spacetime described by the line-element universally called the Schwarzschild solution. In the form given in textbooks, the coefficient (1 − 2Gm/c2r) vanishes at r = 2Gm/c2, a length known as the Schwarzschild radius. If a body is compressed within that radius, the standard interpretation holds that collapse cannot be halted by any pressure, that the surface r = 2Gm/c2 becomes an event horizon through which matter and light pass inward but never outward, and that the collapse terminates in a singularity at r = 0.

On this account the apparent breakdown of the metric at the horizon is a defect of the coordinates rather than of the geometry, removable by the Eddington–Finkelstein or Kruskal–Szekeres coordinate systems, whereas the singularity at r = 0 is genuine, as shown by the divergence there of the Kretschmann curvature scalar. A rotating body gives the Kerr solution and a charged one the Reissner–Nordström solution, and the no-hair theorem asserts that an equilibrium black hole is characterised completely, as seen from outside the horizon, by just three parameters — mass, electric charge and angular momentum.

The observational case rests on the motions of stars and gas around unseen compact masses, on X-ray binaries, on the energetics of quasars and active galactic nuclei, on the orbits of stars about the radio source Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way, on the gravitational-wave signals reported by LIGO from 2015 onward, and on the radio images of ring-like emission published by the Event Horizon Telescope. Hawking's theoretical result that black holes should radiate thermally completes the standard picture.

Two features of this evidence matter for what follows, and both are conceded on all sides. No singularity has ever been observed. No event horizon has ever been observed. What is observed in every case is matter or radiation outside a region that is dark, together with an inference about what the darkness contains.

History of the concept

The prehistory of the idea is usually traced to John Michell, who suggested in 1783, and Pierre-Simon Laplace independently a little later, that a star could in principle be massive and dense enough that the Newtonian escape velocity from its surface would exceed the speed of light, so that its light would not reach a distant observer. This object is now generally called the Michell–Laplace dark body.

The modern history begins with Karl Schwarzschild, who in January 1916, within weeks of the publication of Einstein's field equations, obtained the first exact solution for the field outside a point source. Johannes Droste obtained an equivalent result independently in the same year. In December 1916 David Hilbert published a recast version of the solution, and it is Hilbert's form — not Schwarzschild's — that is reproduced in the textbooks under Schwarzschild's name.

This point of bibliographic history is the hinge of the entire dispute on this wiki, and Crothers has made it his central concern. As he documents in A Brief History of Black Holes (2006), Schwarzschild's own published solution is written in terms of the auxiliary quantity R = (r3 + α3)1/3 with 0 < r < ∞ and α an undetermined constant of integration. In that form the singularity occurs at r = 0, where R = α, and R can therefore never take a value smaller than α. Schwarzschild did not set α = 2m; he did not identify a "Schwarzschild radius"; he did not describe an event horizon; and, in Crothers's words, "he did not breathe a single word about the bizarre object that is called a black hole." Crothers's charge in that essay is blunt: the black hole "has been conjured up by combination of confusion, superstition and ineptitude, and is sustained by widespread suppression of facts, both physical and theoretical."

The later stages of the mainstream development are not in dispute as history. J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder published a calculation of continued gravitational collapse in 1939. Einstein, in the same year, published an argument that the Schwarzschild singularities do not exist in physical reality. Martin Kruskal and György Szekeres gave the maximal analytic extension of the Hilbert metric in 1960, which is the construction by which the horizon singularity is conventionally removed. The name "black hole" itself came into use only in the late 1960s, popularised by John Archibald Wheeler, more than fifty years after the solution from which the object is said to follow.

The dispute over the Schwarzschild solution

Crothers's argument, developed across some twenty-five papers held on this wiki, works entirely inside the standard formalism. It proposes no rival theory of gravitation and no modification of Einstein's equations. It is a claim about identification: about what the symbol r in the textbook line-element actually denotes.

What r is not

In On Theoretical Contradictions and Physical Misconceptions in the General Theory of Relativity (2008) Crothers states the conclusion in one line: the quantity r appearing in the so-called Schwarzschild solution "is neither a distance nor a geodesic radius in the manifold but is in fact the inverse square root of the Gaussian curvature of the spatial section." He arrives at it by applying the standard formula K = R1212/g to the spherically symmetric geodesic surface ds2 = r2(dθ2 + sin2θ dφ2), which gives K = 1/r2. By Gauss's Theorema Egregium the Gaussian curvature is a bending invariant of the surface itself, independent of any embedding space; r is therefore the radius of Gaussian curvature of that surface and, Crothers argues, nothing else. In flat Euclidean space the radius of Gaussian curvature happens to coincide with radial distance, and it is that coincidence, carried unexamined into a non-Euclidean manifold, which he holds to be the source of the confusion.

He supports the diagnosis by cataloguing, with citations to roughly two dozen textbooks, the mutually incompatible names the literature gives to r: a distance, the radius, the radius of a 2-sphere, the coordinate radius, the radial coordinate, the areal radius, the reduced circumference, a gauge choice. That so many descriptions are current, he argues, is itself evidence that the quantity has never been correctly identified. The two commonest fallbacks he regards as empty: since Cp = 2πr and Ap = 4πr2 both hold with r constant, neither the "reduced circumference" Cp/2π nor the "areal radius" √(Ap/4π) tells us what r geometrically is — and the two are in any case the same quantity. What does measure distance in the manifold is the proper radius Rp, obtained by integration, and it is not r.

The consequence: no black hole

If r is a curvature parameter and not a distance, then the interval 0 ≤ r < 2m is not a region of the manifold awaiting better coordinates. It is a range of parameter values with no geometric referent, and the Kruskal–Szekeres "removal" of the singularity at r = 2m is not a repair but a violation of the geometry that the line-element itself fixes. Crothers pursues that specific construction in The Kruskal-Szekeres "Extension": Counter-Examples (2009).

In On the Ramifications of the Schwarzschild Space-Time Metric (2005) he extends his general solution for the simple point-mass in "a true Schwarzschild space" to the point-charge, the rotating point-mass and the rotating point-charge, culminating in a single expression covering the point-mass in all its configurations. The general exact solution, he reports, "is proved regular everywhere except at the arbitrary location of the source of the gravitational field. In no case does the black hole manifest. The conventional solutions giving rise to various black holes are shown to be inconsistent with General Relativity." The technical device is a family of admissible forms Rc(r) = (|r − ro|n + αn)1/n with ro and n arbitrary, which reproduces the historical solutions as special cases — n = 3, ro = 0 giving Schwarzschild's own, n = 1, ro = 0 giving Brillouin's, n = 1, ro = α giving Droste's, which is the textbook metric restricted to α < r < ∞. Every member is asymptotically Minkowskian and every member has exactly one singularity. The related derivations are set out in Gravitation on a Spherically Symmetric Metric Manifold (2007).

A further objection concerns the signature of the metric. The line-element is constructed with fixed signature (+,−,−,−), but inside 2m the signs of g00 and g11 reverse and the roles of t and r are conventionally said to interchange. Relabelling accordingly makes every metric component a function of a timelike variable, so that the black hole interior is, on Crothers's reading, "a non-static solution to a static problem: contra hyp."

Matter removed and reinserted

A separate line of attack concerns where the mass in the solution comes from. Einstein's equations couple geometry to matter through the energy-momentum tensor; setting Tμν = 0 gives Rμν = 0, which by construction describes a spacetime containing no matter at all. The constant of integration is then identified with a source mass, Crothers argues, only "by a contrived analogy with Newton's theory and his expression for escape velocity" — a two-body relation imported into what is claimed to be a one-body problem. His summary: "The astrophysics community removes all matter on the one hand by setting Rμν = 0 and then puts it back in at the end with the other hand by means of Newton's theory."

He sharpens this with de Sitter's empty universe. For the Schwarzschild–de Sitter line element, Tμν = 0 is taken to permit a material cause; for de Sitter's empty world, obtained by setting m = 0, the same condition Tμν = 0 is taken to preclude one. "Tμν = 0 therefore includes and excludes material cause. This is not possible."

Black holes and the Big Bang are mutually inconsistent

Crothers's most-cited claim on this wiki is that the two great pillars of modern cosmology cannot both stand, and that neither stands alone. In The Black Hole, the Big Bang: A Cosmology in Crisis (2010) and in General Relativity – A Theory in Crisis (2012) he argues that Einstein's field equations violate the usual conservation of energy and momentum, and are therefore in conflict with experiment "on a deep level, so that General Relativity is invalid. This fact alone proves the invalidity of the black hole, gravitational waves, the Big Bang cosmology and Einstein's conception of the gravitational field."

The inconsistency between the two objects is structural. The black hole solution is derived for an asymptotically flat, static, spatially infinite spacetime containing one mass and nothing else. Big Bang cosmology is derived for a homogeneous, isotropic, non-static, finite-density universe. Neither can be a special case of the other, and the two are routinely asserted together. On the observational side his complaint is that the inference runs backwards: "Nobody has ever found an infinitely dense point-mass singularity and nobody has ever found an event horizon, the tell-tale signatures of the black hole, and so nobody has ever found a black hole. In actuality, astrophysical scientists merely claim that there are phenomena observed about a region that they cannot see and so they illogically conclude that the unseen region must be a black hole, simply because they believe in black holes. But that is not how science is properly done."

He also locates a cause institutionally, describing these results as "products of a peer review system that has gone awry, having all the characteristics of a closed academic club of mutual admiration and benefit into which new members are strictly by invitation only." His related cosmological papers on this wiki include The Big Bang in Controversy (2007) and On Certain Conceptual Anomalies in Einstein's Theory of Relativity (2008).

Singularities, horizons and escape velocity

Objections to the singularity and to the horizon are made independently of the coordinate argument, and by a considerably wider group of researchers.

Infinite density is forbidden. Crothers gives the elementary form of the argument: since the observed density of a moving body is D = mo/[Xo3(1 − v2/c2)], infinite density is approached only as v → c, which no material body can attain; and since special relativity must hold in sufficiently small regions everywhere in a gravitational field, general relativity inherits the prohibition. He rejects the standard escape clause — that relativity "breaks down" at the singularity — on the ground that a theory cannot simultaneously break down there and tell us that the density there is infinite: "It can't be both, either at the same time or at different times, according to fancy." He adds the ontological point that a point is a mathematical object and a mass a physical one: "One cannot go to a shop and buy a bag full of points, but one can buy a bag full of marbles."

Escape velocity does not mean what the definition requires. Textbooks routinely define a black hole as a body whose escape velocity equals or exceeds c. Taken literally, Crothers argues, this is self-defeating: if the escape velocity is c then light escapes by definition, and if it exceeds c then light can still leave — rise, halt and fall back — so there is always a class of observers who see it. Escape velocity never meant that nothing can leave, only that nothing below that speed leaves permanently. The same distinction disposes, on his account, of the common claim that Michell anticipated the black hole: the Michell–Laplace dark body has an escape velocity, no singularity and no horizon, it can be departed from, it can coexist and interact with other matter, and it is always visible to some observers. "Thus, the M-L dark body does not possess the characteristics of the hypothesized black hole and so it is not a black hole." He also holds escape velocity to be irreducibly a two-body concept, which a one-body solution to Rμν = 0 cannot possess.

There is not enough time to make one. Paul Marmet argues in Relativity and the Formation of Black Holes (1990) that in order to form a black hole matter has to move across the Schwarzschild radius, and demonstrates that on Einstein's general relativity "matter cannot have the time to form a Black Hole when we consider either the proper time or the Schwarzschild time." His conclusion is the mutual-inconsistency claim reached by a different route: "Black Holes are incompatible with the time-limited Big Bang cosmology."

Nothing ever reaches the horizon. C Johan Masreliez obtains a related result inside his Scale Expanding Cosmos model. In Scale Expanding Cosmos Theory III - Gravitation (2004) the gravitational potential is modified by cosmological scale expansion, with the consequence that "a freely falling particle never reaches the event-horizon, which could prevent the formation of black holes."

Collapse is halted by a phase change. Billie Westergard argues in Dynamics of Black Holes and Structure Formation in the Hotson - Westergard Universe Model (2009) and Degenerate Angular Momentum in the Hotson-Westergard Universe Model (2011) that "true black holes do not exist in nature due to forces that prevent the formation of singularities and event horizons." On his reconstruction of the derivation of the field equations, a force produces a phase-change transition from matter to energy near the Planck scale; that phase change is the cause of an ejection process from the nuclear regions of galaxies, and ultimately of the formation of gas, dust and stars — so that what is taken for a swallowing object is in fact the engine of structure formation.

Singularity-free strong-field gravity. Richard Benish inverts the usual reading of curvature in Strong Field Gravity in the Space Generation Model (2009): "Instead of regarding spacetime curvature as the cause of motion, we regard motion as the cause of spacetime curvature." The model matches general relativity closely in the weak field but is singularity-free, and Benish points to the interior solution as the place where the two predictions differ starkly enough to be tested.

Five objections at once. John O Campbell's Black Holes - Fact or Fiction? (1998) works from static concepts of mass energy and gravity-field energy, translating Schwarzschild's criterion for black hole formation into a critical ratio of the two, and then lodging five objections: that the escape velocity equation does not apply to light; that curved space-time is "a geometrical-physical delusion"; that it is incompatible with the Lorentz transforms; that the Doppler effect shows light is not affected by the space-time continuum; and that Kirchhoff's law for black body radiation is violated.

Black holes disappear when the geometry is reinterpreted. J. Brandes argues in A Lorentzian Approach to General Relativity: Einstein's Closed Universe Reinterpreted (1997) that on a Lorentzian interpretation of general relativity, in which curvilinear space is not reality itself but has to be projected onto Euclidean space, "black holes disappear" once the resulting difficulties are resolved. Jaroslav Hynecek reaches the Schwarzschild metric from first principles without using Einstein's field equation at all, deriving it from a new mass equivalence principle, in On the Schwarzschild Metric (2007). Robert L Carroll concludes from an analysis of atomic-clock behaviour, an invariant form of time and the law of the conservative field, in The Black Hole (1993), that "the Black Hole as envisioned in the study of Cosmology has no existence in the real universe."

The whole cosmological package. Zifeng Li treats the black hole as one item in a list. In Baseless and Irrational Modern Cosmology (2012) and its earlier version Baseless and Irrationality of Modern Cosmology (2011) he examines the Big Bang, the nebula-back phenomenon, Hubble's law, multi-dimensional space, curved space and black holes and holds that "these are all baseless and irrational," urging in their place "the materialist view of space-time-mass-energy" and a cosmology that is willing to "know what is known, and know what is not known." Joseph J. Smulsky made the same judgement of the object in the title of his 1996 Apeiron paper, The Black Hole:Superstition of the 20th Century.

The observational claims

Because the theoretical objection is that black holes cannot exist, the researchers here are obliged to say what the observations actually show. Several do.

Named black holes. Crothers has taken particular published detections and disputed them individually. Proof of no "Black Hole" Binary in Nova Scorpii (2012) sets out to prove "in a simple way, with minimal mathematics, that there is no black hole or close black hole binary system in Nova Scorpii, contrary to the published claims of Schmidt et al. (2002)," and to show again that "the concept of the black hole violates the physical principles of General Relativity and is therefore invalid." He has separately published correspondence in which astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics acknowledged that no black hole has been directly observed at Sagittarius A*.

Masses inferred, not measured. Thierry De Mees accepts that something compact and massive sits at the centres of galaxies but disputes how much of it there is. In How Really Massive are the Super-Massive Rotating Black Holes in the Milky Way's Bulge? (2008) he calculates the masses of the Milky Way's central objects from observational data using his Maxwell Analogy for Gravitation, and distinguishes real physical mass from apparent mass. His result is that the so-called supermassive black holes "do not have huge masses at all but that they have an apparent mass that can be thousands times the real mass" — the difference being attributable to the second gravitational field generated by their rotation rather than to additional matter. The companion argument on orbital speeds is in On the Orbital Velocities Nearby Rotary Stars and Black Holes (2006), which addresses the observation that stars near a galactic centre orbit far faster than expected while more distant stars fall abruptly back to normal values.

Lensing. Edward Henry Dowdye attacks the observational chain at its base in Gravitational Lensing in Empty Vacuum Space Does NOT Take Place (2011). His finding is that starlight is lensed "primarily in the plasma rim of the sun and hardly in the vacuum space just slightly above the rim," even though that vacuum region is exposed to virtually the same gravitational field — which he reads as an indirect interaction mediated by plasma rather than a direct gravitational deflection. He extends the analysis to extragalactic sources in Gravitational Deflection of Microwaves from Extra Galactic Pulsar Sources at High Impact Parameters deviate from General Relativity (2013). If deflection requires a plasma medium, the interpretation of galactic-core lensing observations is affected directly.

Quasars. Jack W Sulentic frames the question in the title of Quasar Spectra: Black Holes or Nonstandard Models? (1994), arguing that observational counter-evidence to the standard model does exist — he cites the work of Halton Arp, his own, and William Tifft's — and that "at least three new concepts have assumed great importance in preserving the Big Bang against observational and theoretical challenges." The supermassive black hole engine is one of them.

Light bending near a claimed black hole. Dan Romalo computes the bending of a light ray passing a black hole on the hypothesis of a law of ether absorption-speed near massive bodies, in Bending of a Light-Ray Passing a Black Hole (2005). He reports results that "suggest that some strong astronomic anomalies may, or should be observable by adequate means," and that in consequence "some accepted cosmologic fundamentals may become questionable."

A paper held in the archive but not yet given a page here, The Black Hole – Can the 'Irresistible Force' Overcome the 'Immovable Object?'  (2017), adds a physical argument to the mathematical one, analysing whether the "irresistible force" of increasing gravity can in fact collapse a neutron star against the "immovable object" of its own increasing density, and concludes that it cannot — supporting, in its author's words, "Crothers', et al., contention that a black hole is both a mathematical as well as physical impossibility."

Gravitational waves and LIGO

The 2015 LIGO detection was announced as the merger of two black holes, and it therefore inherits the whole of the dispute above: if there are no black holes there are no black-hole mergers. But the researchers here also object to gravitational radiation on its own terms. See Gravitational Waves for the wider treatment.

Crothers's The Schwarzschild Solution and its Implications for Gravitational Waves (2009) — presented at the 16th Natural Philosophy Alliance conference and written more than six years before GW150914 — joins the two questions explicitly. Having argued that the standard removal of the singularity at r = 2m is erroneous "as the alleged singularity at r = 0 does not exist," he draws the corollary: "This has major implications for the localisation of gravitational energy, i.e. gravitational waves. Schwarzschild's actual solution forbids black holes!"

Three further strands support the conclusion. First, since Einstein's field equations are non-linear the principle of superposition fails, there is no exact two-body solution and no existence theorem, so black-hole binaries, collisions and mergers are on his account invalid concepts to begin with. Second, he revives T. Levi-Civita's 1917 objection that contracting Einstein's gravitational pseudo-tensor yields a first-order intrinsic differential invariant of the metric — an object Ricci and Levi-Civita had proved in 1900 does not exist — from which he concludes that the pseudo-tensor is meaningless and that gravitational energy cannot be localised, and so cannot propagate as a wave. Third, he cites Eddington on the coordinate-dependence of wave propagation, remarking that on that basis "we can 'propagate' coordinate-changes with the speed of thought."

Vyacheslav N Streltsov presses a different objection about observability. In Black Hole Unobservability in General Relativity (2004) he reasons that since gravitation in general relativity affects any object carrying energy, virtual photons and gravitons alike must be attracted by massive bodies; from which "black holes must not radiate gravitational waves and appear to be electrically and gravitationally neutral." A black hole so understood is not merely dark but undetectable in principle — which, if correct, removes the source that the interferometers are said to have heard.

A further archive paper without a page here, LIGO – Gravity Waves or Disturbed Aether? (2018), surveys the challenges made to the detection claims since September 2015, ranging "from denying the very existence of black holes to 'liberties' taken with the interpretation of the signals received at the different sites, especially the fact that these signals were pre-simulated" to match expected waveforms — the objection being that a search which recovers events by matching against a bank of theoretical templates cannot independently confirm those templates.

Alternative models of compact objects

Most of the researchers here do not deny that there are dark, dense, massive objects at the centres of galaxies and in some binaries. They deny that those objects are black holes in the technical sense — horizons and singularities included — and several offer replacements.

Rotating tori rather than points. Thierry De Mees is, after Crothers, the largest single contributor on this subject in the archive, and his approach is the most fully worked-out alternative. He extends Newtonian gravitation by transposing Maxwell's electromagnetism into gravitation, obtaining a second field he calls gyrotation (the Maxwell, or historically the Heaviside, Analogy for Gravitation). Applied to rapidly rotating stars and black holes in On the Geometry of Rotary Stars and Black Holes (2005), the second field yields a definite geometry: part of a spinning star is insensitive to fast rotation and is in fact attracted more strongly the faster it spins, there are velocity-independent angles fixing the object's final torus-like shape, and the same analysis accounts for the double-lobed and equatorial explosions of supernovae. In Mass- and Light-Horizons, Black Holes' Radii, the Schwartzschild Metric and the Kerr Metric (2010) he analyses the horizon results for rotating and non-rotating objects with the same tool and compares them against the Schwarzschild and Kerr predictions. He argues in The No-Hair Theorem Parameters can be Reduced to solely the Black Hole's Specific Angular Momentum (2011) that gravitomagnetism is fully compatible with the no-hair theorem, and that for a globally neutral object the three parameters reduce to one, the specific angular momentum. The Gravitational Stellar Constant Allows for an Improved Description of Stellar and Black Hole Dynamics (2011) and Natural Decrease of Orbital Eccentricities (2012) extend the framework to stellar and orbital dynamics, and Deduction of Orbital Velocities in Disk Galaxies. "Dark Matter": a myth? (2007) applies it to the galactic rotation problem — the same second field being, on his account, the reason Dark Matter appears to be needed and is not.

A dark body without general relativity. Vyacheslav N Streltsov argues in Black Holes without General Relativity (2003) that black holes "are not a specific consequence of general relativity" at all. On his relativistic gravidynamics the frequency and hence the energy of photons decreases at emission in a gravitational field, so that in the limit a sufficiently massive body simply loses the ability to send light signals outward. The result resembles the Michell–Laplace dark body more than the relativistic black hole: an object that is dark, but has no horizon and no singularity.

Density without a horizon. Nainan K Varghese derives dark compact objects from his Hypothesis on MATTER in Black hole (According to 'Hypothesis on MATTER') (2012): very large gatherings of matter that fail to develop the repulsion needed for a stable galaxy collapse into single macro bodies of very high matter density, whose size and matter content reduce or prevent outward radiation of light from their central zone. Philipp M Kanarev takes a narrower technical objection in The Gravitational Radius of a Black Hole (2002): the standard equation for the Schwarzschild radius does not take the wavelength of the photon into account, and solving the problem within a space-matter-time unity yields a different radius, with consequences he says "require us to reconsider the astronomical perspective that we have previously taken."

Aether and vortex accounts. Francis Viren Fernandes reads the Schwarzschild radius as an etheric quantity in Schwarzchild Radius @ Ether (2009), treating it as the diameter to which visible matter collapses when it returns to the ether. Robert L Kemp decomposes gravitational attraction into a Newtonian field force and a self field force in The Net Attraction Force of the Gravitation Vortex (2012), treating the strong-field object as an inertial mass gravitation vortex, and examines the "absence of matter" and "presence of matter" conditions of the field equations in Conditions for the Absence and Presence of Matter in General Relativity (GR) - Einstein Field Equations (EFEs) (2012), where "empty space" turns out to be filled with electromagnetic heat radiation energy. See Aether for the wider literature.

The black hole as a supernova engine. Arnold G Gulko argues in Relation Between Black Hole and Supernova Actions (2008) that since black holes are held to be formed by supernovae, astrophysics has been too quick to ignore the possibility that the two events involve the same mechanism — a position which, like Westergard's, makes the object an ejector rather than only a swallower.

Positions that retain the black hole

Not everyone in this archive is a rejecter, and the exceptions should be recorded.

Nassim Haramein retains the Schwarzschild condition and extends it downward in scale. The Schwarzschild Proton (2009) argues that only a very small fraction of the vacuum fluctuation energy available within a proton volume need be cohered for the proton itself to satisfy the Schwarzschild condition, that the proportion required is close to the ratio between gravitation and the strong force, and that gravitational attraction between two contiguous Schwarzschild protons can accommodate both nucleon and quark confinement — so that "strong" gravity is the strong force. He examines the plasma environment of collapsing gravitational systems with Elizabeth A. Rauscher in Collective Coherent Oscillation Plasma Modes In Surrounding Media of Black Holes and Vacuum Structure - Quantum Processes with Considerations of Spacetime Torque and Coriolis Forces (2004), and the prospect of Planck-scale black hole production at the Large Hadron Collider in The Quest for the Higgs Boson and the Planck Black Hole Production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (2003).

Peter F Browne applies the black hole condition to the universe as a whole in Universes, Black Holes and Elementary Particles (1994), removing the divergence in the zero-point energy density by adding self-gravitational potential energy and finding that the black hole condition is satisfied at the closure radius, so that "being a black hole, the universe is perfectly isolated." Ioannis Iraklis Haranas works entirely within the standard framework in The Temperature of a Black Hole in a De-Sitter Space-Time (2002), deriving upper and lower limits for the Hawking temperature from the present value of the cosmological constant. James G Gilson builds quantised black hole core surface areas into his Friedman dust universe in Galactic Classification, Quantum Gravity and Mass Spectra (2013). Nikos Alexandris proposes calculations of the magnetic field and rotation of Sagittarius A* to be tested against event-horizon observations in Magnetic field of black hole of Sagittarius ( Sgr A* ) (2014). Paul Karl Hoiland applies the P-brane model used for Hawking radiation to the zero-point frame in A P-brane Solution to Three Cosmological Puzzles (2004); Matthew R Edwards uses black hole thermodynamics within his photon-graviton recycling account of gravitation in Photon-Graviton Recycling as Cause of Gravitation (2007); and James P Siepmann's The Laws of Space and Observation: A Unified Theory (2002) predicts a definite true gravitational force for all black holes.

Dmitri Rabounski occupies a distinct position. In On the Current Situation Concerning the Black Hole Problem (2008) he reviews Crothers's solution sympathetically while describing its scope carefully: the new solution "doesn't eliminate the line-element of the classical 'black hole solution' produced by the founders of the problem," but instead expresses the gravitational collapse condition in terms of physically observable quantities accessible to a real observer located in the Schwarzschild space itself, rather than in an abstract flat space tangential to it at the point of observation. He adds that Schwarzschild space is only a very particular case of Einstein spaces of type I.

Criticisms from researchers on this wiki

Researchers documented here whose work bears on the black hole, with the ground each takes:

  • Stephen John Crothers — r is the inverse square root of Gaussian curvature, not a radius; Schwarzschild's own solution forbids black holes; the black hole and the Big Bang are mutually inconsistent; no gravitational waves
  • Thierry De Mees — gyrotation and the Maxwell/Heaviside analogy; rotating objects as tori; supermassive black hole masses are apparent, not real
  • Vyacheslav N Streltsov — dark bodies without general relativity; black holes would be unobservable in principle
  • Paul Marmet — there is not enough time, on either clock, for matter to cross the Schwarzschild radius
  • Billie Westergard — a Planck-scale phase change prevents singularities and horizons and drives galactic ejection
  • Zifeng Li — curved space, the Big Bang and black holes alike are baseless and irrational
  • Robert L Kemp — the gravitation vortex; the absence- and presence-of-matter conditions in the field equations
  • John O Campbell — five objections including escape velocity, curved spacetime and Kirchhoff's law
  • Robert L Carroll — the black hole "has no existence in the real universe"
  • Joseph J. Smulsky — the black hole as a superstition of the twentieth century
  • C Johan Masreliez — a freely falling particle never reaches the event horizon in the Scale Expanding Cosmos
  • Richard Benish — singularity-free strong-field gravity in the Space Generation Model
  • Edward Henry Dowdye — lensing occurs in plasma, not in empty vacuum space
  • Jack W Sulentic — quasar spectra and the discordant-redshift evidence against the standard engine
  • Nainan K Varghese — dense macro bodies without horizons, from Hypothesis on MATTER
  • Philipp M Kanarev — the Schwarzschild radius neglects the photon wavelength
  • Francis Viren Fernandes — the Schwarzschild radius as an etheric quantity
  • Dan Romalo — light bending from ether absorption-speed near massive bodies
  • Arnold G Gulko — a common mechanism for black hole and supernova action
  • Dmitri Rabounski — collapse conditions restated in physically observable quantities
  • Nassim Haramein — the Schwarzschild condition applied to the proton and to the vacuum
  • Peter F Browne — the universe itself as a black hole
  • Ioannis Iraklis Haranas — black hole temperature limits in a de Sitter universe
  • James G Gilson — quantised black hole core surface areas in the dust universe model
  • Nikos Alexandris — magnetic field and rotation of Sagittarius A*
  • Paul Karl Hoiland — P-branes, Hawking radiation and the zero-point frame
  • Matthew R Edwards — black hole thermodynamics within photon-graviton recycling
  • James P Siepmann — black holes in Observational Physics

Papers on this wiki

The Schwarzschild solution and the mathematical case

The black hole disputed on physical grounds

Gravitational waves and observability

Observations reinterpreted

Alternative models of compact objects

The black hole retained or reinterpreted

Papers held in the archive but not yet given pages here include The Black Hole – Can the 'Irresistible Force' Overcome the 'Immovable Object?'  (2017), LIGO – Gravity Waves or Disturbed Aether? (2018), The Mandelbrot Set as a Quasi-Black Hole (2017), and Valyn C Williams's light-hearted 1983 essay How to Make Black Holes From Golf Holes.

See also

External links

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