Black holes don't exist, instead dark-energy stars?

[Fred]

This guy is highly irratating, he spoke at my university several months ago. And everyone (including me) grilled him to death, I think he went away rather pissed off.

/rant

Hes fundamentally a condensed matter guy drifting into a field he really doesn't understand, that has a set of working principles that explain 99.99% of all experiments and he has to focus on the .0001 percent grey margin and ignore the rest (basically he throws general relativity and quantum field theory out the window). That always pisses me off to no end. There are technical problems with everything he proposes, and the whole theory doesn't make a hellava lot of sense. To give an analogy, it would be like if a business man started lecturing the IT guys on how best to organize their code.

Anyway its rather trivial to see you could use his model to get faster than light causation, and the whole thing badly breaks the poincare group in the interior of the event horizon. Its bad physics, its absurd, and another example of the press overhyping a story that they don't understand.

 

[London Geezer]

This guy is highly irratating, he spoke at my university several months ago. And everyone (including me) grilled him to death, I think he went away rather pissed off.

/rant

Hes fundamentally a condensed matter guy drifting into a field he really doesn't understand, that has a set of working principles that explain 99.99% of all experiments and he has to focus on the .0001 percent grey margin and ignore the rest (basically he throws general relativity and quantum field theory out the window). That always pisses me off to no end. There are technical problems with everything he proposes, and the whole theory doesn't make a hellava lot of sense. To give an analogy, it would be like if a business man started lecturing the IT guys on how best to organize their code.

Anyway its rather trivial to see you could use his model to get faster than light causation, and the whole thing badly breaks the poincare group in the interior of the event horizon. Its bad physics, its absurd, and another example of the press overhyping a story that they don't understand.

whoa....

 

[Brimstone]

Anyway its rather trivial to see you could use his model to get faster than light causation, and the whole thing badly breaks the poincare group in the interior of the event horizon. Its bad physics, its absurd, and another example of the press overhyping a story that they don't understand.

Well, before the "Nature" article, Scientific American had a story about his theory in July of 2003. He must have some supporters for his theory to still be discussed.



Frozen Stars

 

[sunscar]

That was one hell of an explanation by "nutball". I wasn't speaking of them both existing within the same area of space right on top of one-another, I was speaking of existing somewhere in space at the same time. Not far fetched.

Later

 

[Fred]

It doesn't matter if he has supporters (mainly condensed matter people), physics isn't democracy. When you toss out the window general relativity, and pretty much any conceivable sensible modification thereof people are going to be irate. Not to mention he's changing the infrared sector of the theory (read the part that continues to special relativity), and tossing out global geometrical notions eg the very essense of what a black hole is.

The thought experiment to disprove such a notion is perfectly trivial. Assume some nearby massive star begins the process to form a blackhole, millions of years from now the collapsing radiation shell will pass its schwarschild radius and become a blackhole. An invisible radius might reach around us, and without our knowing classically we are now in an event horizon. Light that we emit will never be able to reach outside the spherical shell and away to infinity.

Good, perfectly plausible, an undergrad with half a semester of GR knows enough to write down a penrose diagram to see that any event horizon that forms lives far in our own past lightcone and can't be observable to us. No local measurement we do will ever be able to know about the true 'mass' of the object and hence its radius.

This silly guy argues that we can. He argues all sorts of weird quantum phenomena will be apparent to us, in other words we will know when the event horizon passes us by measuring the thickness of the region (which he argues is a function of the endstate mass of the bh). Hmm, except now some aliens in some remote galaxy will be able to instantly signal us by bouncing off gamma rays or something onto the shell, and we will then know about what they are talking about by the size of the quantum thickness where the critical behaviour si taking place.

Do not pass go, do not collect 400 dollars... Cause and effect in his model are now explicitly violated. Thank you, but not thanks.

 

[Brimstone]

This silly guy argues that we can. He argues all sorts of weird quantum phenomena will be apparent to us, in other words we will know when the event horizon passes us by measuring the thickness of the region (which he argues is a function of the endstate mass of the bh). Hmm, except now some aliens in some remote galaxy will be able to instantly signal us by bouncing off gamma rays or something onto the shell, and we will then know about what they are talking about by the size of the quantum thickness where the critical behaviour si taking place.

Do not pass go, do not collect 400 dollars... Cause and effect in his model are now explicitly violated. Thank you, but not thanks.

One of the scientists supporting his theory is a Nobel Prize winner.

Chapline admitted that every time he was giving a talk, people would think that he had lost his mind. This was the case until 2000 or so when he met Robert Laughlin who agreed with Laughlin completely. There is a difference however: Laughlin is a Nobel prize winner who became a big shot in condensed matter physics while Chapline is a field theorist. From an outsider such as Laughlin, some comments simply may sound a bit less embarassing because everyone knows that Laughlin just tries to extend his incredible success from condensed matter physics where he has achieved everything he could to completely different fields of human activity.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/03/chapline-black-holes-dont-exist.html]Luboš Motls blog[/url]

The theory very well might be wrong, but hey George Chapline and his supporters are trying to think outside the box. To call him silly is uncalled for. Science is about investigating things and hypothosizing.

 

[OpenGL guy]

To paraphrase Douglas Adams: There are those who believe that if the universe is understood it will be replaced by something even more inexplicable. Some believe this has already happened.

 

[jvd]

who be that open gl guy ?

 

[Sonic]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

[nutball]

One of the scientists supporting his theory is a Nobel Prize winner.

What has that got to do with the price of fish? Having a Nobel Prize (presumably for physics, not literature, you're talking about) doesn't make you right in the future (or actually even right in what you got your Nobel Prize for).

The theory very well might be wrong, but hey George Chapline and his supporters are trying to think outside the box. To call him silly is uncalled for. Science is about investigating things and hypothosizing.

I work in a branch of physics where it seems to be the vogue to explain every new mildly interesting observation with a new theory. I work with people who can (and do) quite shamelessly concoct two totally contradictory theories within the space of a few hours, and will be quite happy publishing them both. They will declare the first as "quite clearly correct", until they formulate the second (which is now "quite clearly correct", and the old one is "only believed by idiots").

To them, having the ideas and "throwing them out there" is what it's all about (and the fact that publishing 95% crap gets them lots of papers, and hence research income, and hence a Professorship, is not the reason for it, honest (yeah, right!)).

Problem is, what this approach does is bog down the scientific literature with total crap. It becomes very hard keeping up-to-date with the latest best thinking on a given issue. It makes it very hard for some wet-behind-the-ears PhD student to wade through thousands of pages of inane crap that people probably knew in their hearts was wrong when they published it. The danger is that someone, somewhere actually *has* published the right answer, but how the hell are you going to find it is it's swamped out by crap in the literature base?

It's not so bad if the theories are insightful and thought-provoking, and come from a clever mind. Problem is, the non-clever minds see this approach as a quick route to a Professorship, and copy the style without bothering themselves with the efficacy of the content.

Science is not about having every idea that's it's possible to have, and saying everything it's possible to say. It's all about signal-to-noise. See what I'm saying? A profusion of good ideas is a good thing, a simple profusion of ideas isn't, especially if you can no longer see the good ideas for the crap.

 

[London Geezer]

**London-boy imagines Chapline's inner brain workings**

Yawnnnn.... Monday morning.... What the hell am i doing here? Haven't done anything for years, s'not like i'm gonna discover something today... Time for... coffeee....

...


Aaahhhh nice coffee... nice black coffeee........ black....... black holes.... mmmmmmm... never really got that whole black holes thing, it just doesn't add up... let me get out my old uni notes...

...

right... Black... Holes... strange things... see, just doesn't add up.. unless.... unless i put this number here... YES! It works!!

...


But... well they're still black holes... no one will care about my theory unless....

...

... unless i call that friend of mine from uni, he should still be working for that scientific paper place thing... yes, and i'll tell him that black holes are not really black holes, they are... errr...

...


...

Dark Energy Stars!!!

... Yeah, sounds cool enough...

... coffee... mmmm...

 

[Fred]

Laughlin is very controversial in our field. Don't get me wrong he's a brilliant scientist who accomplished everything there is to be accomplished in condensed matter, but the last 15 years of so he's gone on a bit of a tangent and is pushing his schtick on particle and astrophysics. Chapline was one of Feynmans proteges but has worked mostly on condensed matter for the last twenty years.

You can google for the emergent vs reductionist argument thats been going on. You can guess which side im on, although at least theres something somewhat intelligent and interesting about the debate.

Anyway Chaplin's material is far less controversial in the sense that specialists deride it with scorn, it takes 2 minutes of contemplation to think up the absurdities it would entail not to mention it will invalidate hundreds of working models and likely ruled out observationally regardless of the fact that it makes no sense.

99.9999% of all Physics isn't really thinking outside the box btw. We don't think outside the box of Newton, b/c well he's 100% correct in his domain of applicability. You can always claim there is some limiting regime where our understanding fails to make sense and postulate new physics there, but all that is acceptable so long as your careful not to step outside the zone where experiment and logic force you into an interpretation (thats how special relativity came to be). Otoh when you throw out tried and cherished principles that have passed 100 years of experiment, needless to say people get pissed off. MOND is another popular theory in the press thats like that. Read ridiculous outside its potential domain (a fitting algorithm for galaxy rotation curves).

Btw Lubos is a friend (the blogspot you linked too), he most certainly does not approve of Chaplines ... ideas about the causal structure of spacetime.