Abstract
It seems using double standards in physics can explain why in recent years physicists have started to talk about black holes as something established and accepted (by not interpreting “infinite time” as “never”), whereas, according to the Schwarzschild solution of the Einstein equation, black holes will never form for distant observers (like all of us) since they require infinite time for that (in the case of light, the “infinite time” needed for it to leave a black hole has been interpreted by the same physicists to mean “never”); black holes require finite time to form only for observers falling together with the collapsing star.
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Notes
- 1.
According to different accounts, the term “black hole” had been introduced in the sixties of the last century either by Wheeler or Dicke (Dicke compared that spacetime region to a prison in India called the Black Hole, because no one who entered it left it alive).
- 2.
In addition to this problem, Papapetrou also and particularly emphasizes the serious anomaly on the Schwarzschild sphere, whose physical meaning, I think, has not been thoroughly examined [10]:
But these geodesics are space-like for \( r > 2m \) and time-like for \( r < 2m \). The tangent vector of a geodesic undergoes parallel transport along the geodesic and consequently it cannot change from a time-like to a space-like vector. It follows that the two regions \( r > 2m \) and \( r < 2m \) do not join smoothly on the surface \( r = 2m \).
.
- 3.
The other (relevant) one was mentioned in the previous chapter—the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1993 whose reason for awarding the Prize was also carefully and correctly worded: “for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation.”
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Petkov, V. (2021). Black Holes. In: Seven Fundamental Concepts in Spacetime Physics. SpringerBriefs in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75638-3_7
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