Black Holes ‘Do Not Exist’
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James Joyner | Friday, April 1, 2005 |
Despite what science fiction writers and Stephen Hawking tell us, black holes ‘do not exist’, according to the current Nature.
Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist. Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange ‘dark energy’ that is driving the Universe’s accelerating expansion. George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. “It’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist,” he claims.
Black holes are one of the most celebrated predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space-time caused by massive objects. The theory suggests that a sufficiently massive star, when it dies, will collapse under its own gravity to a single point. But Einstein didn’t believe in black holes, Chapline argues. “Unfortunately”, he adds, “he couldn’t articulate why.” At the root of the problem is the other revolutionary theory of twentieth-century physics, which Einstein also helped to formulate: quantum mechanics.
Interesting.
Update: Yes, today is April 1st. But the article is dated yesterday.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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An article like this on April 1st? Hmm...
Don't tell me, I've seen black hos....
Well, I should have checked out the date. Even so it's a pretty startling claim.
Re: Ralf Goergens
No. Hawkins is trying to prove by disproving. Afterall, his life work is on Black Hole. If he can conclusively not disprove the existance of Black Hole, then they exist.
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