Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote:
> In fact, this may be more correct than one might think. There is at 
> least one alternative theory about "black holes", which Hawkings is the 
> one suggesting, which suggests that the concept of singularity is itself 
> flawed.

  I assume that the opposition some astrophysicist have against singularities
stems from the fact that the equations of relativity fail there (in simple
terms, you get a division by zero, which thus tells you nothing). In other
words, the theory of relativity predicts the existence of a phenomenon which
it cannot formulate. Something else would then be needed to formulate the
physics of a singularity.

  That something might not even exist. Some physicists hence conjecture
that perhaps it's the singularities which do not exist, even though the
relativistic equations predict them. Maybe the known laws of physics change
somehow when space bends enough.

> Basically, you can't form one, you can only get increasingly 
> larger, hotter, objects, which, due to their gravitation, merely "look 
> like" a singularity.

  There would have to be an unknown phenomenon of physics which would stop
matter and energy from collapsing into a singularity. No such phenomenon
has been observed nor probably even plausibly conjectured.

> Worst thing about this problem is that, even the fact that it took us 
> until now to see that far means that things that are beyond a certain 
> distance are not lost in the wash of the speed barrier, which would have 
> been visible a few thousand years ago, and more lost to it from tens of 
> thousands, and more from millions, etc. We can never, from our position, 
> short of finding a way past the limit of the speed of light, ever *see* 
> any of those things, and given long enough, assuming the sun somehow 
> survived that long, or our species did, by moving around elsewhere, 
> those descendants would look up and go, "Obviously all that stuff about 
> constellations they once wrote is nonsense, nothing is visible past this 
> single galaxy."

  Constellations have nothing to do with other galaxies.

  And my guess is that the Sun will explode way before the universe has
expanded so much that we can't see any other galaxies anymore.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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