So first off, I'm going to start writing about cool science stuff more often.
LB has the political stuff covered,
MacBitch has the cool stuff covered, so I'm left with geeky science. Read on at your own risk!
Interesting
article (click
here for Nature's report on it) I came across. Black holes have been studied, theorized, and written about for so long, I kinda figured that they were irrefutably known to be real. Not so according to Dr. Chapline. He actually has a pretty cool argument for why they don't exist. I don't follow all of the details, but essentially it spawns from the fact that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are in contradiction with each other in some cases. One such case occurs at the edge of black holes where gravity and quantum effects are both prominent.
Sidenote: Usually they don't conflict with each other because at small scales Quantum Mech is important, and gravity is negligible, while at astronomical scales gravity matters, but QM doesn't. (gravity==General Relativity)
He argues that Quantum mechanics should prevail, and hence there is no singularity in space-time (aka blackhole). He develops an alternative explanation for what happens, and has some evidence to back it up. Basically his alternative is that where a blackhole would be, there is instead a dark energy star. It still possesses a large graviational field (like any normal type of star), but something crazy happens near the event horizon (boundary of the blackhole/dark energy star) where there's a quantum critical shift (no idea what that means!).
Anyways, the attraction of the new explanation is that you don't have places where all of our usual laws of physics break down, such as the problem of information being destroyed in a black hole; things work out okay for a dark energy star.
r.
