The black hole "frozen star" interpretation is the one that's right

[Farsight]

Like I've been saying, once you understand one thing in physics it’s easy to understand the next. Once you understand that time travel is science fiction, you understand why Einstein said the speed of light is not constant. After that you understand how gravity works: light curves because the speed of light varies with position, and matter falls down because of the wave nature of matter. And after that, you can understand black holes.

Straight up. Yes, straight up. Because imagine you’re standing on a planet shining a laser beam straight up into space. The light goes straight up. It doesn’t curve. Now imagine it’s a denser more massive planet. The light still goes straight up. It still doesn’t curve. Let’s make it really massive. That light still goes straight up. It still doesn’t curve. But when we make it so massive that it’s a black hole, all of a sudden light can’t escape. Why not?

Some will tell you that the light curves back down into the black hole. When you challenge that by saying the light didn’t start curving on the massive planet, they’ll change tack. They’ll say it’s because spacetime is curved. Then when you challenge that by saying spacetime is an abstract mathematical space, they’ll change tack again and tell you about the waterfall analogy. That’s where space is falling inwards so the light beam doesn’t make any progress. That’s garbage. In no sense is space falling inwards in a gravitational field. A gravitational field alters the motion of light through space, but it doesn’t suck space in. Because it’s a region of inhomogeneous space, like Einstein said. Like this:

Optical clocks go slower when they’re lower because the space down there is different to the space up here. They call it gravitational time dilation, but it’s just the light going slower when it’s lower, so the clocks go slower too. How much slower? Have a google on infinite gravitational time dilation. What pops up time and time again? Yes, black holes. Remember those parallel-mirror light-clocks at different elevations? Gravitational time dilation is said to go infinite at the black hole event horizon. So an optical clock at the event horizon doesn’t tick at all. And if it doesn’t tick, it can only be because the light isn’t moving. Because the speed of light at the event horizon is zero. That’s why your laser beam doesn’t get out of the black hole. Not because of some mystic curvature, or because the sky’s falling in, but because at that location the speed of light is zero, zip, zilch. The light isn’t moving, so it doesn’t go up and it doesn’t get out because it is effectively “frozen”.

Did you know that black holes were originally called frozen stars? If you google on frozen star Oppenheimer you can find references to this. However if you google on frozen star and follow the links, what comes up is black hole along with a point singularity. It’s like history has been rewritten. It’s like the original “frozen star” has been airbrushed away, and replaced with something else. Something stupid. See the picture below?

Image credit: W H Freeman, publishers

My mate Jesse put it up on the internet. It’s a screenshot from Misner/Thorne/Wheeler, the “bible” of gravitation. It depicts Schwarzschild coordinates for a body falling into a black hole. See the dashed line up the middle? That’s the event horizon. See how to the right of it the curve goes up? Do you know where that’s headed? It’s headed to the end of time. Only it’s cut off vertically, and then it comes back down. Yes, according to MTW if you fall into a black hole, you go to the end of time and back in no time flat. That’s why you read about the elephant and the event horizon, where the elephant is in two places at once. Sadly there’s even an echo of this in Kevin Brown’s the formation and growth of black holes. He refers to the frozen star, but doesn’t favour it, and talks about “future infinity” instead. Fall into a black hole and that’s where you go. And back again.

It’s crap. The truth is that when you fall into a black hole, everything goes slower and slower until it stops. Your clocks go slower and slower, and so do you. Some people think you can cancel out a stopped clock with a stopped observer, who somehow sees the clock ticking normally. But he doesn’t. He’s stopped. He doesn’t see anything. Ever. At the black hole event horizon the speed of light is zero, so he can’t see. His light is stopped, and because of the wave nature of matter, he’s stopped too. And because light can’t go slower than stopped, light isn’t going to curve any more, and he isn’t going to fall any further. So the frozen-star black hole grows like a hailstone. Which is apt.

Only there’s something I forgot to mention. If you fall towards a black hole you fall faster and faster. And all the while the speed of light is getting slower and slower. So, is there some crossover point where you end up going faster than the local speed of light? Relativity says no, the wave nature of matter says no, and The Man from Del Monte says no. So it stands to reason that something bad is going to happen. Like you get ionised and annihilated. Hence gamma-ray bursters. Hence Friedwardt Winterberg’s firewall, which is “very different to Hawking radiation”.

There’s other things different too. For example you’ll have heard of gravitational blue shift. But remember your conservation of energy. When you drop a 511kev photon into a black hole, the black hole mass increases by 511keV. So whilst people talk about blue-shifted photons, those photons don’t actually gain any energy or increase in frequency as they descend. All that happens is that clocks go slower when they’re lower, so you measure a higher frequency when you’re lower. That’s relativity for you. You understand time, then the speed of light, then gravity, then black holes, and then you realise just how much nonsense is out there. Because you realise just how simple it all is.

 

[paddoboy]

The dark star Interpretation simply does not hold up under scrutiny.
Once the Schwarzchild limit is reached, then further collapse is compulsory. I did mention this before in another thread about BH's and the frantic efforts of the anti mainstream brigade to be heard, and it was Ignored.
Therefor the dark star interpretation is invalid.

 

[paddoboy]

The dark star Interpretation simply does not hold up under scrutiny.
Once the Schwarzchild limit is reached, then further collapse is compulsory. I did mention this before in another thread about BH's and the frantic efforts of the anti mainstream brigade to be heard, and it was Ignored.
Therefor the dark star interpretation is invalid.

In essence then the thread title, like so many other thread titles posted by our seemingly fanatical alternative theorist people, is bullshit.

 

[RJBeery]

It's a good post, Farsight. I believe I've found peace with this subject, and here's my summary: what you've written here is factually correct, however it's going to be read by two groups of people. 1) Those who don't have the intellect or the patience to understand it, and 2) Those who already understand it but chose to reject your (our) interpretation that black holes do not exist today because it is nuanced and a bit subjective.

A perfect example is Gerard 't Hooft here. I think we would all agree that he generally knows what he's talking about and can be considered an authority on the subject. Note the parts in bold:

[QUOTE='t Hooft][...]one does see that the Schwarzschild solution (or its Kerr or Kerr-Newman generalization) emerges only partly: it is the solution in the forward time direction, but the part corresponding to a horizon in the past is actually modified by the contracting ball of matter. All this is well-known. An observer cannot look that far towards the past, so he will interpret the resulting metric as an accurate realization of the Schwarzschild metric. And its mass? The mass is dictated by energy conservation. What used to be the mass of a contracting star is turned into mass of a "ball of pure gravity". I actually don’t care much about the particular language one should use here; for all practical purposes the best description is that a black hole has formed.
[/quote]
For all practical purposes the black hole has formed. I think we can all AGREE on this point! We all agree that there's an area in the center of many galaxies which would be a bad place to visit. However...

[quote='t Hooft]
But has it really? Isn’t it so that the collapsing star hangs out forever at the horizon? Well, in terms of the Schwarzschild coordinates, this is formally true! The Schwarzschild solution is the asymptotic limit of the solution in the forward time direction. At finite times, the region behind the horizon does not exist. However, for this analysis, one can better use the Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates, where one does notice that the future part of the horizon does exist. This discussion is compounded a bit because the construction of the maximal extension of spacetime is subtle, and it is certainly not understood by C.
[/quote]
And here's where the subtlety comes in to play. We all know that the event horizon is a coordinate singularity rather than a physical one, that horse has been beaten to death many times. There are posters on this forum whose last line of defense is to mock the apparent preferential use of Schwarzschild coordinates, as 't Hooft is doing with his final comment:

[quote='t Hooft]
Think of a map of the North Pole of the Earth, where it could be that coordinates were chosen such that they cannot be extended across the equator. Formally, the equator is then a horizon. But nobody who’s walking on the equator has any trouble with that. [/QUOTE]
For the purposes of doing a mathematical analysis (as he mentioned earlier) he is of course correct. However, for the purposes of declaring physical existence today we cannot do this. The reason has to do with our treatment, as observers, of the temporal dimension. The map presumes the globe's complete preexistence, which is easy for us to relate to. However, if we used the Southerly direction to indicate moving forward in time then we could only proclaim that the equator existed for those people already there. In his analogy saying that somebody "could" be walking on the equator, concluding that it therefore it exists, is equivalent to saying that somebody "could" be stepping across the event horizon in the infinite future.

Przyk has a more complex objection, which is that the global concept of "now" is pretty meaningless in GR. However, granting this point leaves us with two options when making absolute claims about existence: 1) proclaim that all of spacetime predicted by the GR mathematical model "exists today" (including dinosaurs, Cleopatra and the death of our sun, or 2) accept that we can only proclaim that an object existed when it resides in your past light cone, realizing that we cannot make a comment about it's current state. For example, we cannot absolutely claim that the sun exists; we can only verify that it existed roughly 8 minutes ago. #1 implies Block Time, and #2 rules out black holes (sorry). I'm actually OK with either of these but I doubt many are...

 

[przyk]

Przyk has a more complex objection, which is that the global concept of "now" is pretty meaningless in GR. However, granting this point leaves us with two options when making absolute claims about existence: 1) proclaim that all of spacetime predicted by the GR mathematical model "exists today" (including dinosaurs, Cleopatra and the death of our sun, or 2) accept that we can only proclaim that an object existed when it resides in your past light cone, realizing that we cannot make a comment about it's current state. For example, we cannot absolutely claim that the sun exists; we can only verify that it existed roughly 8 minutes ago. #1 implies Block Time, and #2 rules out black holes (sorry). I'm actually OK with either of these but I doubt many are...

Actually, I thought I gave you options 3) and 4):

3) While simultaneity isn't globally defined in GR, spacelike separation is and could be considered the natural relaxation of that. You seem to have agreed that regions inside the black hole, including part of the singularity itself, can be spacelike separated from an outside observer's perspective. By contrast, you are not spacelike separated from the life of Cleopatra or the invasion of Earth by the Worm People in AD 2138.

4) The SR definition of simultaneity can still apply locally to an arbitrarily good approximation in small enough regions of spacetime (as you would expect from every day life). So an inertial observer just outside the event horizon of a large enough black hole could consider it exists "now" by approximately the same meaning of "now" that we use in SR.

 

[RJBeery]

Actually, I thought I gave you options 3) and 4):

3) While simultaneity isn't globally defined in GR, spacelike separation is and could be considered the natural relaxation of that. You seem to have agreed that regions inside the black hole, including part of the singularity itself, can be spacelike separated from an outside observer's perspective. By contrast, you are not spacelike separated from the life of Cleopatra or the invasion of Earth by the Worm People in AD 2138.

Consider observer A on Earth, observer B on the Planet of the Worm People 1 Billion LY away, and region C within the event horizon of the theoretical black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It's easy to show that any attempt at defining "concurrent existence", even strictly in terms of SR, leads to problems. If A makes a statement about existing concurrently with B who happens to be in relative motion (by even a small amount) then B's claims of concurrent existence with A will not match up; B will claim that either a younger or older A "exists". Claims of existence do not commute, therefore any non-local absolute claims of existence are equivalent to #1 scenario (Block Time) above. The only absolute claims we can make are related to our past light cones in regards to what "has existed".

4) The SR definition of simultaneity can still apply locally to an arbitrarily good approximation in small enough regions of spacetime (as you would expect from every day life). So an inertial observer just outside the event horizon of a large enough black hole could consider it exists "now" by approximately the same meaning of "now" that we use in SR.

Postulating this inertial observer's claims about C is equivalent to accepting his crossing over the EH and literally arriving at C. I'm willing to bet that, for some arbitrary level of approximation of simultaneity, reaching that region of spacetime technically outside the EH also approximately extends maximally to the infinite future.

 

[przyk]

Consider observer A on Earth, observer B on the Planet of the Worm People 1 Billion LY away, and region C within the event horizon of the theoretical black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. It's easy to show that any attempt at defining "concurrent existence", even strictly in terms of SR, leads to problems. If A makes a statement about existing concurrently with B who happens to be in relative motion (by even a small amount) then B's claims of concurrent existence with A will not match up; B will claim that either a younger or older A "exists". Claims of existence do not commute, therefore any non-local absolute claims of existence are equivalent to #1 scenario (Block Time) above. The only absolute claims we can make are related to our past light cones in regards to what "has existed".

Er, yes? This is just saying that any claim or definition of concurrent existence would be relative to a particular observer. This is just an obvious consequence of relativity of simultaneity. It doesn't present any more or less of a problem for black holes than does for anything else in special or general relativity.

By the way, in terms of binary relations I think the technical terms you're looking for are "symmetry" and "transitivity". Concurrence is neither symmetric nor transitive in special relativity. Spacelike separation is symmetric but not transitive. Timelike separation (without reference to causal order) is also symmetric but not transitive, while timelike separation (with reference to causal order) is symmetric and transitive and defines a partial ordering relation between events in spacetime.

Postulating this inertial observer's claims about C is equivalent to accepting his crossing over the EH and literally arriving at C. I'm willing to bet that, for some arbitrary level of approximation of simultaneity, reaching that region of spacetime technically outside the EH also approximately extends maximally to the infinite future.

I really have no idea what you're talking about here. A locally inertial coordinate system technically means one for which:

• the metric components $$g_{\mu\nu}$$ equal the Minkowski metric components at a certain point $$p$$ in spacetime, and
• the metric component gradients $$\partial_{\rho} g_{\mu\nu}$$ all vanish at that point $$p$$.

This means that locally inertial coordinates work like and have the same significance to an observer as SR inertial coordinates do, up to small error terms in the coordinates over short distances and time scales. In general relativity, it's always possible to construct a locally inertial coordinate system around any point $$p$$ in spacetime where the geometry is nonsingular (like at the event horizon of a black hole, for instance). This is just a more technical way of saying what some people have already told you: there's really nothing remarkable about the geometry or physics in the vicinity of a black hole event horizon.

 

[Farsight]

It's a good post, Farsight.

Thanks RJ. Sorry to be slow replying, we had company over the weekend.

I believe I've found peace with this subject, and here's my summary: what you've written here is factually correct, however it's going to be read by two groups of people. 1) Those who don't have the intellect or the patience to understand it, and 2) Those who already understand it but chose to reject your (our) interpretation that black holes do not exist today because it is nuanced and a bit subjective.

Noted. But please note that IMHO the point-singularity in the middle does not exist today.

A perfect example is Gerard 't Hooft here. I think we would all agree that he generally knows what he's talking about and can be considered an authority on the subject. Note the parts in bold... ...for all practical purposes the black hole has formed. I think we can all AGREE on this point! We all agree that there's an area in the center of many galaxies which would be a bad place to visit.

Good stuff.

However...

But I have to confess I'm not a fan of 't Hooft. Or Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates. Or Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates.

And here's where the subtlety comes in to play. We all know that the event horizon is a coordinate singularity rather than a physical one

Sorry, no. People say it's a mere coordinate singularity, but I don't agree. It's the end of events. And the end of space and time as we know it Jim.

There are posters on this forum whose last line of defense is to mock the apparent preferential use of Schwarzschild coordinates, as 't Hooft is doing with his final comment: "Think of a map of the North Pole of the Earth, where it could be that coordinates were chosen such that they cannot be extended across the equator. Formally, the equator is then a horizon. But nobody who’s walking on the equator has any trouble with that".

His analogy is the typical dismissive pop-science pseudo-explanation we tend to see about black holes and coordinate systems. It totally evades the issue of the infinite gravitational time dilation.

For the purposes of doing a mathematical analysis (as he mentioned earlier) he is of course correct. However, for the purposes of declaring physical existence today we cannot do this. The reason has to do with our treatment, as observers, of the temporal dimension. The map presumes the globe's complete preexistence, which is easy for us to relate to. However, if we used the Southerly direction to indicate moving forward in time then we could only proclaim that the equator existed for those people already there. In his analogy saying that somebody "could" be walking on the equator, concluding that it therefore it exists, is equivalent to saying that somebody "could" be stepping across the event horizon in the infinite future.

Agreed. It ain't ever gonna happen. It's cloud-cuckoo physics. It's neverneverland cosmology.

Przyk has a more complex objection, which is that the global concept of "now" is pretty meaningless in GR. However, granting this point leaves us with two options when making absolute claims about existence: 1) proclaim that all of spacetime predicted by the GR mathematical model "exists today" (including dinosaurs, Cleopatra and the death of our sun, or 2) accept that we can only proclaim that an object existed when it resides in your past light cone, realizing that we cannot make a comment about its current state. For example, we cannot absolutely claim that the sun exists; we can only verify that it existed roughly 8 minutes ago. #1 implies Block Time, and #2 rules out black holes (sorry). I'm actually OK with either of these but I doubt many are...

Spacetime is merely an abstract mathematical space, and light cones don't actually exist, so neither 1) nor 2) apply.

 

[Russ_Watters]

1. Is there any experiment, locally, that the infalling observer can perform to detect his upcoming freeze?

2. Have you found a way out of your own acknowledgement that the remote observed never, in fact, sees the infaller actually freeze?

 

[RJBeery]

Spacetime is merely an abstract mathematical space, and light cones don't actually exist, so neither 1) nor 2) apply.

Wait a minute, what do you think "exists out there" if you don't believe in Block Time? It seems to me we can either claim subscribe to some sort of a "flowing" of existence or a permanent "block" existence. My contention is that all attempts to piece together the former lead to inconsistencies.

 

[RJBeery]

Also, Farsight, how do you reconcile the micro black holes which are supposedly forming all the time in our atmosphere in addition to those potentially formed at LHC? If your "frozen star" interpretation was correct then we should see permanent remnants of these entities in some form. My reconciliation is that they are radiated away (prior to an actual EH formation)...

 

[Farsight]

1. Is there any experiment, locally, that the infalling observer can perform to detect his upcoming freeze?

Not really. It's a bit like falling asleep. Or freezing to death. You don't know about it.

2. Have you found a way out of your own acknowledgement that the remote observed never, in fact, sees the infaller actually freeze?

No, and none is needed. As gravitational time dilation goes infinite the speed of light goes to zero. You can't see that. Light has stopped.

 

[Farsight]

Wait a minute, what do you think "exists out there" if you don't believe in Block Time?

Space and motion through it.

It seems to me we can either claim subscribe to some sort of a "flowing" of existence or a permanent "block" existence. My contention is that all attempts to piece together the former lead to inconsistencies.

There is no actual time flowing, and there is no actual block universe. Space is real enough. Hold your hands up a foot apart. That gap, that space between them, is real. Motion is real enough too. You can waggle your hands. That's our world in a microcosm. Space and motion. Clocks clock up motion. Space is what it is. Waves run through it. Light moves, sh*t happens, that's it.

Also, Farsight, how do you reconcile the micro black holes which are supposedly forming all the time in our atmosphere in addition to those potentially formed at LHC? If your "frozen star" interpretation was correct then we should see permanent remnants of these entities in some form. My reconciliation is that they are radiated away (prior to an actual EH formation)...

See wikipedia. See the bit that says "Some extensions of present physics posit the existence of extra dimensions of space. In higher-dimensional spacetime, the strength of gravity increases more rapidly with decreasing distance than in three dimensions. With certain special configurations of the extra dimensions, this effect can lower the Planck scale to the TeV range". That's what you need for LHC black holes. It's baloney from people who don't have a clue about gravity.

 

[Write4U]

Not really. It's a bit like falling asleep. Or freezing to death. You don't know about it.

No, and none is needed. As gravitational time dilation goes infinite the speed of light goes to zero. You can't see that. Light has stopped.

If light stops it has zero mass, so if a black hole consists of stopped light where does it's mass come from?

Moreover, from what i read, it is implied that in a black hole all wave functions stop. And we know what happens when we "collapse" a wave function.

Spmehow this does not sound right. what am I missing?

 

[OnlyMe]

If light stops it has zero mass, so if a black hole consists of stopped light where does it's mass come from?

Moreover, from what i read, it is implied that in a black hole all wave functions stop. And we know what happens when we "collapse" a wave function.

Spmehow this does not sound right. what am I missing?

DOES THE INERTIA OF A BODY DEPEND UPON ITS ENERGY-CONTENT?

While the photon has no (recognized) rest mass, it adds and subtracts from the mass of an atom during absorption and emission. Why would it be different for a black hole?

 

[CptBork]

Beyond the event horizon, light cones curve inwards towards the center, and this is a coordinate-independent result in GR. If General Relativity applies beyond the event horizon of a black hole, then at no point does time stop for an observer crossing the horizon, and their clocks will register a finite time period before they get pulled into the singularity at the center along with all light and anything else that crosses the horizon.

 

[Farsight]

If light stops it has zero mass, so if a black hole consists of stopped light where does it's mass come from?

If light slows down it has an "effective mass". If you catch a photon in a mirror-box it's like it's been stopped, and the mass of the system is increased. If you actually stop light, all the photon energy is effective mass.

Moreover, from what i read, it is implied that in a black hole all wave functions stop. And we know what happens when we "collapse" a wave function.

I don't think a stopped wavefunction is a collapsed wavefunction.

Somehow this does not sound right. what am I missing?

The optical Fourier transform. It's kind of like wavefunction collapse.

 

[Farsight]

Beyond the event horizon, light cones curve inwards towards the center, and this is a coordinate-independent result in GR. If General Relativity applies beyond the event horizon of a black hole, then at no point does time stop for an observer crossing the horizon, and their clocks will register a finite time period before they get pulled into the singularity at the center along with all light and anything else that crosses the horizon.

Sorry CptBork, but the central singularity is another fairy tale. It takes place in a never-never-land beyond the end of time. Read the OP.

I am not lying to you, I am pointing out that some of the things you have been taught are wrong. When you think for yourself, this is quite obvious.

 

[Farsight]

DOES THE INERTIA OF A BODY DEPEND UPON ITS ENERGY-CONTENT?

While the photon has no (recognized) rest mass, it adds and subtracts from the mass of an atom during absorption and emission. Why would it be different for a black hole?

Good man. Also see Light is Heavy by van der Mark and 't Hooft. Not the Nobel Laureate 't Hooft, I think it's a guy at Philips Eindhoven.

 

[CptBork]

Sorry CptBork, but the central singularity is another fairy tale. It takes place in a never-never-land beyond the end of time. Read the OP.

I am not lying to you, I am pointing out that some of the things you have been taught are wrong. When you think for yourself, this is quite obvious.

The singularity only lies beyond "the end of time" as seen outside the black hole. The usage of Kruskal coordinates shows that an observer falling into the black hole will register a finite amount of time on their clocks before hitting the central singularity, and any other choice of coordinates will automatically yield the same result because an observer's proper time is invariant under changes of coordinates. Unfortunately, since you were never taught and never attempted to learn the mathematical description of Schwarzschild black holes (or the countless things taught before you even get to that point), you're in no position to determine what is or isn't implied by the theory.