FRESH

Hacker News

Einstein and his peers were resistant to black holes

105 points by tigerlily

by sega_sai

4 subcomments

When there is no experimental evidence for black holes, it makes perfect sense to be resistant/skeptical to new type of objects with solutions involving infinities (singularity). Whether that's being irrational or not is up to debate. I'd say that's a good prior when there is no data (as there wasn't at the beginning of 20th century).

by IIAOPSW

5 subcomments

Given he was clearly convinced in the end by sound arguments, was it really irrational or was he just a hard sell for good reasons?

by newpavlov

2 subcomments

Plenty of physicists are still "resistant" to the idea of black holes having a real singularity. The recent Kerr paper [0] only adds fuel to this resistance with its hilarious statement "Faith, not science!" about singularity proponents.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00841

by rosmax_1337

3 subcomments

To this day I believe black holes remain a mostly theoretical phenomena. Which also happens to deal with infinity-mathematics in the singularity, something we don't see in reality otherwise.
Yes, observations have been made to their advantage, through LIGO and more recently the image from 2022 of a black hole made by the Event Horizon Telescope. But I would stress that the ""image"" is much more complex than simply a photo from really good ""telescope"", it's a image made of combined data from radio telescopes all around the world. There is enough weird hoops that they need jump through that the observation can reasonably be doubted in my opinion, which isn't to say that what they've attempted is awesome and inspiring.
Please correct me if you have other information.

by shadowgovt

1 subcomments

TBH, "irrationally" is a value judgment that I can't agree with.
Einstein's approach to physics was to reason out the consequences of observable phenomena. He approached understanding of the nature of the speed of light by realizing that a universe where you could travel as fast as (or faster than) a light ray would have consequences that we didn't see. So when the math tells him "gravity causes some regions of space to blow up to become inescapable," and we hadn't seen black holes yet, I think his first intuition being that we'd missed a trick that made the math fail to match reality was a fine intuition.
Math is only useful to physics to the extent that it actually models reality, and not all the extrapolations it makes turn out to have practical grounding; sometimes chasing the extrapolation reaches a contradiction that demands adjustments to math to fix the model. Chasing such adjustments in light of evidence is how we reached relativity in the first place.

by umvi

1 subcomments

This article seems like a rehash of the recent Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6akmv1bsz1M
For example, compare the picture of Karl Schwarzschild in the article to 7:54 in the Veritasium video. Just a coincidence?

by CHB0403085482

0 subcomment

If you prefer the video version of the theory....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6akmv1bsz1M

by dhosek

0 subcomment

The edited headline we have now makes it sound like twentieth-century physicists had some sort of anti-gravity thing going on.

by pharrington

0 subcomment

by brcmthrowaway

2 subcomments

by baxtr

7 subcomments

I don’t want to open another box, but how exactly do people distinguish between rational vs irrational behavior?
You might define it as quick system 1 vs thoughtful system 2 reaction.
But I’m pretty sure Einstein had thought this through and had good, rational reasons at that time to “resist” the idea of black holes.

by VagabundoP

0 subcomment

This stuff was cosmic horror to all these folk. It caused existential crisis when you try imagine what is happening in and around a black hole. I'm not surprised they did everything they could to deny and disprove it.
Most would have had religious convictions that were really challenged by the physical reality of the universe.