Dead Stars Don't Radiate

>That kind of emotional writing does not become someone whose profession should focus on scientific persuasion.

What you'd probably prefer reading is one of the sources John Carlos Baez cites [0]:

Comment on “Gravitational Pair Production and Black Hole Evaporation” Antonio Ferreiro1, José Navarro-Salas, and Silvia Pla

Where they take the equation used in the paper, and outline how there is a better way than using that equation

"... is obtained to the lowest order in a perturbative expansion, while the standard way to obtain the non-perturbative Schwinger effect using the weak field approximation is to perform a resummation of all terms"

and how the one in the paper being critiqued can't handle situations arising from electromagnetic cases, much less the gravitational one properly. These are the statements Baez makes but the cited paper gives in a much more professional tone and method.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...

I'm not sure what more you want from him, there are many papers and even a textbook linked?

It's bloody John Baez, the man knows his stuff.

On you actual point, it is shocking because its claimed that baryon number is not conserved without black holes getting involved

> The conservation of baryon number is not consistent with the physics of black hole evaporation via Hawking radiation.

There are other black hole models that can conserve these quantum numbers!

Speaking of things that are so obviously true that you must be an idiot not to agree, there are statements so obviously false that you have to be an idiot to agree: People keep repeating the nonsense put out by Penrose, which require non-physical timelike infinities to work.

The current "pop science" (nearly science fiction) statement is that it is possible to fall into a black hole and there is "nothing special" about the event horizon.

Quite often, just one paragraph over, the statement is then made that an external observer will never observe the victim falling in.

The two observers can't disagree on such matters!

To say otherwise means that you'd have to believe that the Universe splits (when!?) such that there are two observers so that they can disagree. Or stop believing in logic, consistency, observers, and everything we hold dear as physicists.

This is all patent nonsense by the same person that keeps insisting that brains are "quantum" despite being 309K and organic.

If the external observer doesn't observe the victim falling in, then the victim never falls in, full stop. That's the objective reality.

Penrose diagrams say otherwise because they include the time at infinity, which is non-physical.

Even if the time at infinity was "reachable", which isn't even mathematically sound, let alone physically, Hawking radiation is a thing, so it doesn't matter anyway: Black holes have finite lifetimes!

There is only one logically consistent and physically sound interpretation of black holes: nothing can ever fall in. Inbound victims slow down relative to the outside, which means that from their perspective as they approach the black hole they see its flow of time "speed up". Hence, they also see its Hawking evaporation speed up. To maintain consistency with outside observers, this evaporation must occur fast enough that the victim can never reach any surface. Instead, the black hole recedes from them, evaporating faster and faster.

This model (and similar ones), can preserve all quantum numbers, because there is no firewall, no boundary, nothing to "reset" quantum fields. Everything is continuous, consistent, and quantum numbers are preserved. Outside observers see exactly what we currently expect, black holes look and work the same, they evaporate, etc...

A Lot of these physics papers are interesting but ultimately just noise. An untested Theory is NOT fact, it's just someone (with or without a PhD) pulling something out of their arse that might explain things. Most of cosmology and physics is still theory (even the big bang, and string theory) and even if 90% of theory fits facts, they could still be wrong. I am seeing more and more of these un-testable theories, built on other un-testable theories, citing other un-testable theories, this is why theoretical physics is in a crisis IMHO.

MY mother and father also have an untested theory that explains all this too it's called "God", most Sci-Fi authors have plenty, and I am sure AI's will soon add to this pile.

Kudos to those scientists that create testable papers or experimentally prove stuff.

Is it really that siloed? The condition mentioned in the article (there being a global timelike Killing field) is discussed in all introductory texts on quantum field theory in curved spaces, it's even present in the first few paragraphs of the relevant Wikipedia article[1]. Even if it doesn't apply here, the authors ought to have mentioned why not.

I don't think they were stupid per se, nor malicious, but perhaps cavalier in pushing a result with such unexpected consequences without getting a consult.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory_in_curved...

Well, there's another aspect which is that the original authors and pop-sci journalists don't seem to be able to understand where they went wrong or how outrageous their claims are, precisely because their jobs depend on not understanding. The could have corrected it. We could not still be circling this drain 2 years later, but we are.

Kinda classic. Kinda boring.

> There's an issue this highlights [...] there's clearly a lot of knowledge held in silos.

I think the real issue this highlights -- which is something everyone knows and still everyone does -- is that people love to spread and discuss sensational stories, and no one likes to hear naysayers ruining the fun.

Look the discussion of the original story here in HN[1]. There's a comment by A_D_E_P_T way down in the discussion explaining why the paper is nonsense and pointing to one of the replies objecting to it mentioned in the article from this post. That comment was downvoted by HN readers. I know because it was greyed out when I upvoted it days ago.

So there's no knowledge silo -- us simple folk just want to discuss the newest breakthrough without looking too hard, because that spoils the fun.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43961226

It certainly wasn't in "silos", it's all on arxiv!

But yes: the world is complicated and it's easy to make mistakes outside your core field. The point of the scientific process is to get things in front of eyeballs who can spot the mistakes, c.f. the linked blog post. Then everyone fights about it or points and laughs or whatever, and the world moves on. The system worked.

What the process is not good at is filtering new ideas before people turn them into news headlines. And sure, that sucks. But it's not a problem with "academia failing", at all. The eyeballs worked!

99.999999999% of people do not have enough knowledge to even dream of beginning to understand a majority of research. Adults can barely read, much less be able to pass Calc 1.

You have to remember the "one particle in the pair fails to escape the event horizon" explanation is a simplification of the alleged reality, which is the scattering of particles (or fields) in the presence of an event horizon. As far as I know there is no intuitive, non-mathematical way to describe this accurately, so science communicators of all stripes tend to approximate it in ways that can mislead the audience.

The man himself (Hawking) said: "One might picture this negative energy flux in the following way. Just outside the event horizon there will be virtual pairs of particles, one with negative energy and one with positive energy. It should be emphasized that these pictures of the mechanism responsible for the thermal emission and area decrease are heuristic only and should not be taken too literally."

That one's a big white lie of how Hawking radiation works. It's not even an approximation, just a far-fetched metaphor that Hawking made up, presumably to satisfy science journalists.

It's better to burn out than to fade away.

> I'm someone who thinks the 'surface' of an event horizon is where the laws are preserved,

I don't think this is a good way to think it. If black hole is big enough, there is nothing strange happening in the event horizon, no significant length contraction, nothing.

> I'm someone who thinks the 'surface' of an event horizon is where the laws are preserved, and that the singularity or even perhaps the entire interior inside black holes may simply not exist at all.

Sounds tempting, but then what happens at the transition : when a sphere of matter gets just a little bit too dense ?