Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcablecom> wrote:
> >> Based on what? Observation?
> >
> >    Pretty much, yes. Observation in the sense that GR has hold up pretty
> > well in a very large amount of different experiments (including things
> > like gravitation lensing and orbital measurements of the Moon).
> >
> Same argument could have, at one time, been made about Newtonian 
> physics. The first examples of where that didn't work where people 
> going, "Yeah, but.. what about in this case?"

  Are you claiming you have a better theory than general relativity?

  You make it sound like it was a general consensus among the scientific
community that singularities cannot exist (because their physical properties
cannot be described with the GR equations and because they seemingly violate
many rules of QM). From what I have seen, it's the exact opposite: Scientists
don't seem to have any problem in talking about singularities (in both black
holes and at the beginning of the big bang). It sounds to me like the
consensus is more like "as long as we don't have a physical model which
explains singularities away, the *simpler* assumption is that this prediction
of GR is correct", and hence they talk as if they could be assumed to exist.

> Even the explanations 
> go something like, "And then once you travel past the horizon you get 
> torn apart and there is nothing but chaos.", which is a fairly lame way 
> of saying, "We don't have a damn clue, but something has to happen, and 
> its the only thing we can think of, if GR applies." That's not even a 
> description, its a wild guess, with no details at all.

  Now you are making a blatant straw man.

  Countless papers, publications, PhD theses and books have been published
about the properties of the interior of a black hole. These are extremely
complicated and lengthy dissertations, often with such advanced math (using
very advanced mathematical tools such as tensors and such) that even most
professional astrophysicists have a hard time understanding them.

  When an astrophysicist who *does* understand the geometry of the interior
of a black hole is asked for a short explanation targetted at laymen, he's
not going to make a 4-hour lecture with all the GR equations and the lengthy
derivation required and highly advanced terminology. He's going to use short
similes and allegories. Just because he uses similes and allegories doesn't
mean he doesn't understand what's going on.

  Your allegation that these astrophysicists "don't have a damn clue" is
just inane. You are basically claiming that the people who make their
living from understanding GR don't understand GR.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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