John R. Strohm wrote:
> Dr. Stephen Hawking showed, many years ago, that existing theory allows
> for the existence of regions of space-time that are flat-out unobservable.
Theories can be wrong. They can (and do) have limits and border-cases where
they don't work. All work on black holes operates under the condition that
the inventor of this theory, Albert Einstein, dismissed black holes as
"outside the scope" cases of his theory. You can go down to quantum
mechanics and prove (repeatable) that Einstein is "wrong". On the other
side, there's no QM/QFT explanation for space-time curvature, so Heisenberg
and Feynman are also "wrong".
> Hawking's talk was entitled "The Breakdown of Physics in the Region of
> Space-Time Discontinuities", or some such. His second slide was the same
> title, except he'd crossed out the word "Physics" and substituted
> "Physicists".
Hawking's title is quite close to the truth. He should have replaced
"Physics" with "Theories" instead of "Physicists". We may not know a better
theory, but this sort of GR-apologets prove that sometimes, scientists go
over to the "faith" side (and thereby "break down"). They believe in their
theory, even when their calculations show that it doesn't work.
If you repeatedly and reproducable get a black hole to emit a whale and a
flower pot, you are welcome to present your results here. So far, noone
managed to observe the event horizon of a black hole. We just know there
are more or less dark, massive objects (some of them are so much in the
"less dark" side that they are much brighter than their surrounding
galaxy). We also know that there's a huge lack of matter in galaxies. If
the current theory of gravitation is right, this matter must hide somewhere
(behind the couch?). It's more likely that the current theory of
gravitation is not fully accurate.
The difference between science and faith is that scientists don't really
believe in theories. Normal people often just exchange their beliefs, since
they can't and won't do the experiments, anyway.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
