Egnor: [t]he logic pointing to God’s existence is overwhelmingly stronger than the evidence and logic supporting any other scientific theory in nature. Aquinas’s First Way proof of God’s existence, for example, has exactly the same structure as any other scientific theory. The empirical evidence is the presence of change in nature. Because infinite regress is logically impossible in an essentially ordered chain of changes, there must be a Prime Mover to begin the process and that is what we call God.
Tag: black holes
Stan Robertson’s paper on black holes is free for download
One factor that one needn’t be a physicist to see is that black holes became a “thing” in popular culture, in a way that “red dwarfs” and “white dwarfs” never did. No one says that red dwarfs, for example, are a gateway to another universe. That sort of thing may affect people’s willingness to evaluate the evidence base critically. Cf Darwinism.
Rob Sheldon takes aim at black holes: How much is really known?
It is most unfortunate that both scientists themselves and the popular press discuss black holes (bh) as if they are (a) a scientifically defined object; and, (b) an experimentally observed one.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks, Should Stephen Hawking have won the Nobel? Rob Sheldon weighs in
Rob Sheldon: Hawking did not get the Nobel, however, because he hung his hopes on the radiation emitted by BH–the so-called “Hawking radiation”. And it was never observed. Sabine tries to explain why. But one argument that Sabine doesn’t make, is that Hawking radiation may never have been observed because BH are themselves never observed.
Avi Loeb suggests that the design of life might have been a black hole. Michael Egnor responds
Michael Egnor: Both an intelligent designer (assuming we’re talking about God) and a black hole are supernatural, in the sense that they are not objects in the natural world. This may not surprise you about God, but it is also true of black holes.
Researchers: Black holes are collapsed universes
Robitzski: “It suggests our entire universe might just look like any other tiny black hole bubble to an outside observer.”
Will black holes really break physics?
Physicist: You see, the black hole isn’t just eating matter and belching radiation, it is reversing entropy. This shouldn’t be possible.
A recent black hole collision has spurred thinking about the tiniest scales
Classically, it shouldn’t have happened.
Sabine Hossenfelder: The black hole information problem is not solvable
Hossenfelder: Today I comment on the recent claim that the black hole information loss problem is “near its end” and explain why this is nonsense.
At Forbes: Hawking’s black hole paradox is NOT solved
Ethan Siegel looks at the limitations: But we’re still a long way away from determining exactly where that information goes, and how it gets out of a black hole. Theorists disagree over the validity and soundness of many of the methods that are currently being employed to do these calculations, and no one has even a theoretical prediction for how this information should be encoded by an evaporating black hole, much less how to measure it.
Did the black hole paradox really come to an end? Rob Sheldon offers some thoughts
Sheldon: Black Holes are a theoretical and empirical disaster. Given two possible assumptions to Schwarzschild’s solution of Einstein’s gravity equation, nearly everyone has taken the discontinuous, unphysical, “event-horizon” assumption leading to “Black Holes”. One of the many predictions of BH, is that they cannot have magnetic fields, and they destroy anything that falls into them, converting all that matter into “Hawking radiation”. What about all that data showing high density objects at the center of our galaxy and neighboring galaxies?
Roger Penrose thinks black holes are left over from a previous universe
It all sounds so much like religion, actually, but maybe that’s the direction in which High Science is heading.
At Forbes: Claim that Stephen Hawking “lied” about black holes
Can’t help but make one wonder how much else in popular science literature is wrong but sells books.
At Gizmodo: A black hole collides with something that “shouldn’t exist”?
Dvorsky: Astronomers are puzzling over observations that show a black hole smashing into a mystery object of unusual size.
Black holes are—no surprise—full of surprises
At Quanta: In the latest surprise, that link turns out to exemplify a general fact about nature. In a paper published in March in Physical Review Letters, Goon and Riccardo Penco broadened the lessons of the earlier work by proving a simple, universal formula relating energy and entropy. The newfound formula applies to a system such as a gas as well as a black hole.