"The Black Hole Catastrophe" - woo or not?

DeiRenDopa

Master Poster
Joined
Feb 25, 2008
Messages
2,582
"And the Collapse of Spacetime", by Stephen J. Crothers.

Here is the URL to this 9-page PDF: http://www.wbabin.net/science/crothers6.pdf

The abstract:
The notion of black holes voraciously gobbling up matter, twisting spacetime into contortions that trap light, stretching the unwary into long spaghetti-like strands as they fall inward to ultimately collide and merge with an infinitely dense point-mass singularity, has become a mantra of the astrophysical community, so much so that even primary school children know about the sinister black hole. There are almost daily reports of scientists claiming that they have again found black holes here and there. It is asserted that black holes range in size from micro to mini, to intermediate and on up through to supermassive behemoths. Black holes are spoken of as scientific facts and it is routinely claimed that they have been detected at the centres of galaxies. Images of black holes having their wicked ways with surrounding matter are routinely included with reports of them. Some physicists even claim that black holes will be created in particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, potentially able to swallow the Earth. Despite the assertions of the astronomers and astrophysicists, nobody has ever found a black hole, anywhere, let alone “imaged” one. The pictures adduced to convince are actually either artistic impressions (i.e. drawings) or photos of otherwise unidentified objects imaged by telescopes and merely asserted to be due to black holes, ad hoc.
It seems to be an attempt to show that General Relativity (GR) contains a fatal internal inconsistency.

In terms of its stated scope, what would you, dear reader, say is its most glaring mistake?

Note that this document does not attempt (in any meaningful way) to address any astronomical (or other) observations, so any mistakes must be in aspects such as internal logic, misreading (or worse) of GR, or failure in the underlying math.

Note too that the most glaring mistake may not be the most devastating ... for example, it may be possible to reasonably easily patch up (or over) a glaring mistake (if it were relatively trivial for example), but not a fundamental one (which may be rather subtle and not at all glaring, for example).
 
This:
Some physicists even claim that black holes will be created in particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, potentially able to swallow the Earth.
Seconded.

--- From the paper.
An inertial frame is just somewhere Newton’s First Law holds ...
No, it's not. That's a necessary, but far from sufficient, condition. However, this error is somewhat excusable in that there are scientific sources that commit it.
General Relativity cannot violate Special Relativity by definition ...
What does that mean? It's true that GTR locally (i.e., over 'small enough' spatial and temporal regions) reduces to STR, but if the claim that STR and GTR cannot disagree, then that's trivially false.
It follows from these postulates that infinite density is forbidden because infinite energy is forbidden, ...
It doesn't follow from STR alone, the argument presented is completely ludicrous:
1. The relativistic mass diverges as v→c, and observed size tends to zero, so the relativistic mass density diverges as v→c.
2. Therefore, an object of relativistic mass density → infinity has v → c, which is impossible.
There's a very glaring difference between a conditional and its converse: A implies B is not interchangable with B implies A. A point particle (e.g., as far as we can tell, electrons are point-particles) would have infinite relativistic mass density without having infinite energy or luminal velocity.

There's also a more fundamental error of treating 'mass' and 'relativistic mass' as equivalent. It's particularly silly in this case, because relativistic mass is just an effect of viewing the same object in a different frame of reference, while a black hole remains a black hole in all frames of reference.

But we have already seen that infinite density is forbidden by the Theory of Relativity.
No, it isn't, and the argument to that effect is plainly nonsensical.

Sec.3 is mind-boggling stupid, 4 is too short to commit any major crimes against humanity, and Sec.5 contains many misunderstandings, including
--the claim that a vanishing stress-energy tensor should result in no gravitational effects, which is very curious, since there are gravitational effects in vacuum (Ricci curvature is matter, the result, Weyl curvature, is tidal forces)
--a completely spurious identification of Gμν/κ as energy-momentum of the gravitational field; this is not physics
--the claim that GTR has no conservation of energy-momentum, whereas it is in fact a mathematical consequence of the field equation, derived in almost every GTR textbook

It was early pointed out to Einstein by a number of his contemporaries that his General Theory violated the usual conservation of energy and momentum.
This is true in a sense, but far from what the author seeks to imply. Specifically, conservation of energy-momentum takes the form
--"There is no energy-momentum created or destroyed at any point in spacetime." This is analogous to the non-divergence of magnetic field lines in electromagnetism (assuming no monopoles).
but it does not allow one to say
--"The total energy-momentum is X." This is only possible in some specialized cases.

His invention was his pseudo-tensor. But Einstein (and his followers) did not realise that his invention, as well as being simply unscientific augmentation to satisfy a desire, is nonsense, for the following reason: his pseudo-tensor is in fact just a meaningless concoction of mathematical symbols and so describes nothing.
I wonder how the author feels about ordinary angular momentum in Newtonian mechanics, which, after all, is a pseudotensor of rank 1! Here's a shock: the ordinary vector cross product of two vectors is not a vector, but a pseudotensor (pseudovector, to be more precise). And guess what--cross products of vectors are not geometrical invariants either for precisely that reason.

I can deeply emphasize with the thorny issues of energy in GTR, gravitational energy in particular, but this is just pathetic. (By the way, Einstein credited for pseudotensors--??)

Sec. 6 appears to be roughly "no superposition, so we can't study it", which is silly because plenty of things are non-linear and can be studied, even computationally if all else fails (computational GTR is not a small subfield, actually). It's only notable the "there is no analytic solution, so there is no solution at all" gem of shiny pseudo-logic.

Sec. 7 sunk to new lows, and I gave up at that point.
 
Evidence for black holes

1. Some regions of space there are massive releases of energy in a very small area. The best explanation for this is black holes.

2. They have also found stars that orbit an unseen object.

Cannot give links though.
 
There's also a more fundamental error of treating 'mass' and 'relativistic mass' as equivalent. It's particularly silly in this case, because relativistic mass is just an effect of viewing the same object in a different frame of reference, while a black hole remains a black hole in all frames of reference.

I'd go further: relativistic mass is a useless concept which was only ever introduced to make some relativistic equations look superficially the same as their Newtonian counterparts. It is mathematically redundant with energy, and (as you point out) naive useage can lead to absurdly false conclusions. Which is why it's been essentially abandoned by modern relativity texts. There's simply no reason or need to ever use it.
 
In terms of its stated scope, what would you, dear reader, say is its most glaring mistake?

Emotion. "Sinister" black holes? Having their "wicked way" with matter? "Voracioualy gobbling"? This is supposed to be science, the facts should be allowed to speak for themselves. Why is he trying to depict black holes as something to be feared? All this appeal to emotion reminds me far too much of creationists.
 
Here is more of the story. apparently he is a genius who is not well received:
http://www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/PhD.html
From one of the emails, by Mr S Crothers, from that site (all open and public, as far as I can tell):
<scientist>, you are a liar, a scoundrel, a fraudster, and a hypocrite. You ridicule others and abuse them and are indignant when you are given a dose of your own filthy medicine. No thinking scientist takes you seriously. You arbitrarily suppress papers, in your new capacity as Editor of the <name> journal. You maintain a website wherein you vilify one Prof. <another scientist> (it does not matter if his work is right or wrong, you have no right to vilify him in this asinine way), you are so egocentric that you have busts and portraits made of yourself and post images of them on your website to satisfy your arrogant and all consuming desire for self-aggrandizement, and you cannot even to geometry into the bargain.

You have also ignored <a third scientist> and <a fourth scientist> on the issue of gravitational radiation. That does not help you. It only reaffirms your ignorance and your intention to distort the facts. Finally, I don't give one rats arse if you block my email address. I don't want email from the likes of you either, inevitably destined for the dustbin of scientific history. And being a vulgar working class man I am content with my working class vulgarity, so I freely use accurate common parlance unashamedly.
I've xxx-ed names; see if you can guess who they are, without reading the primary source ...
 
Emotion. "Sinister" black holes? Having their "wicked way" with matter? "Voracioualy gobbling"? This is supposed to be science, the facts should be allowed to speak for themselves. Why is he trying to depict black holes as something to be feared? All this appeal to emotion reminds me far too much of creationists.
Mr Crothers is nothing if not emotional ...

Fortunately for the future history of science and the benefit of future students of theories that will replace GR, all Mr Crothers' works (papers) are available, free, from his website (as DD found). There, for example, may be found a clear exposition of the relatively simple, straight-forward error built in to most accounts of GR found in standard textbooks and reference papers spanning some eight decades and written by hundreds of physicists and mathematicians ... perhaps some kind professor could set her students a 'challenge' assignment along the lines of 'show the flaws in Crothers' core ideas and (for extra credit) provide a non-flawed derivation of <result(s)>'?
 
I think the author of this paper has a little reading to do... for starters.
Mr S Crothers is, per his personal website, quite familiar with black holes.

His unorthodox (shall we say) ideas about GR in general, and black holes in particular, seem to stem from his initial paper, On the General Solution to Einstein's Vacuum Field and its Implications for Relativistic Degeneracy, which is available from here.

Logically, finding a fatal flaw in that paper would mean all of his subsequent papers, claims, etc were also (fatally) flawed ... at least in regard to the substantive content. Of course, I could be wrong, and perhaps this paper is not the foundation one, or perhaps there are what Mr Crothers thinks are fatal inconsistencies in GR presented in other papers, independent of what's in the first ...
 
I only skimmed the article for time reasons but it says that the Gravity Probe B experiment was a failure. How can that be? Isn't the experiment still ongoing?
 
It's wrong. I looked through the paper once, immediately found an elementary mistake, and stopped there.

The guy is just another of these megalomaniac physics cranks. He displays all the usual symptoms. In this case he knows a little more math than most, but not much.
 
It's wrong. I looked through the paper once, immediately found an elementary mistake, and stopped there.

The guy is just another of these megalomaniac physics cranks. He displays all the usual symptoms. In this case he knows a little more math than most, but not much.
Thanks sol.

That he seems to believe - quite strongly - that he's found a fatal flaw in a key application of GR ('black holes') is obvious. As I said in my previous post, most, perhaps all, serious claims about GR and black holes follow (logically) from his initial paper, with, beyond doubt, many mistakes and errors added as embellishments along the way (as Vorpal has already pointed out).

For the benefit of the general reader of this thread, would you mind taking a look at the first paper (link in my previous post), and point out what flaws you see in it?

If his version of history, on his website, is not in serious error (and does not contain serious omissions), it would seem that something odd happened during the latter part of his PhD studies ...
 
For the benefit of the general reader of this thread, would you mind taking a look at the first paper (link in my previous post), and point out what flaws you see in it?

Sure. In this paper, take a look at equation (7). The second term contains (C' dr)^2. But C' dr = dC. Hence, equation (7) can be written in a much more simple form where we use C as a coordinate rather than r. Actually C^{1/2) is more convenient, and if you make that transformation, lo and behold you obtain the standard Schwarzschild metric with alpha = 2GM and C^{1/2}=rho (the standard Schwarz. radial coordinate).

So that's it - eq. (7) is correct, it is the unique asymptotically flat vacuum metric with spherical symmetry, and it is nothing other than the standard black hole metric you'll find in every text on GR. The rest of the paper is nonsense - for example the list of functional forms for C(r) between (17) and (18) is utterly meaningless (all functions C(r) describe precisely the same physical spacetime because they are all related by a trivial coordinate transformation). There are many other false statements, but I won't bother to point out more.

If his version of history, on his website, is not in serious error (and does not contain serious omissions), it would seem that something odd happened during the latter part of his PhD studies ...

It sounds like he went a bit crazy in an aggressive way and got (probably rightfully) shut out. There are cases like that in most physics departments - some unstable grad student loses it and drops out or gets kicked out of the program. Probably in some cases it's something that could be handled better, say with professional psychological help or counseling, but physicists aren't often very good with people, and dealing optimally with situations like that is quite difficult.
 
Last edited:

Back
Top Bottom