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Posted by silverana on November 13, 2000 11:06:44 UTC

i found this article somewhere ....
hav a read thru it if u hav nothin else to do ...

__________
What is the latest on black holes?

Well, the latest is that black hole theory is alive and well. The Hubble Space Telescope continues to
uncover spectacular evidence that such beasts exist, and so far as many of us are concerned, black
holes are now an established 'fact' of life. Of course there may be some new idea 'out there' waiting
to be discovered that can provide the same explanations for phenomena as black holes, but no one
knows what it would be, and Einstein's theory of General Relativity still sits there infested by black
hole singularities! If black holes do not exist, then Einstein's theory is wrong. Given the number of
tests of Einstein's theory since the 1920's, it is hard to imagine how such a successful theory could be
wrong. We have to presume it is correct until such a time that it can be shown to be wrong.

A reader recently chastised me for my 'glib defense of the existence of black holes based on
Einstein's Theory holding up for 80 years, and that the world was [considered to be] flat for a lot
longer than 80 years. I do not make apologies.

General Relativity predicted the existence of such objects, astronomers have now reached a
consensus opinion that they exist based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope, and many other
observations that point towards black holes as the simplest explanation for what we are seeing. This
is, classically, how we decide whether a theory is good or not. Added to 6 other fundamental 'tests'
of General Relativity, GR is alive and well and not currently in need of any revision. It will certainly
need to be modified to make it compatible with quantum mechanics..but even so, the 'correction' will
only apply to less than 1 percent of our understanding of the physical world at scales billions of times
smaller than an atomic nucleus. It will have no impact on the large-scale properties of black holes,
only on a proper description of what goes on inside of them, which is unobservable by us in the first
place.

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