Black holes and modern day physicists

Ardent

I was watching a BBC Horizon programme the other night called The Hawking Paradox. It outlined the theories around black holes of two prominent physicists, Stephen Hawing and Leonard Susskind. It also focused on their battle to out-do each other and become top-dog and foremost expert in the field of black holes and singularities.

One thing that struck me watching it was: are these guys full of shít or what?! I mean, here they are claiming to prove the inner workings of black holes and what happens to matter in these singularites and where it all goes...all through mathematics and equations! The supposed "proof" of their theories comes by way of general acceptance of their ideas and papers by their peers. And their peers - the physics community - generally strike me as being a cross between a bunch of frat boys and a pack of sheep.

I found it laughable that these guys would spend 30+ years using numbers to try to discredit each other and prove the other guy wrong. At the end of the day, mankind stilll has little or no understanding of the fundamental forces in our universe (e.g, we still don't know what gravity is) and these so called experts probably don't know any more about black holes than I do. I mean, we didn't even know black holes existed until 1980 when we saw the first one!

Sorry for the rant. I guess what I'm getting at is the following question:

Are these modern day physicists and so-called geniuses on the ball and to be respected or is it all just a load of hot air?

djhaxman

You posted the other day about how great the Kepler mission was, and I totally agree with you. However, if Physics is all a load of hot air, do you think we'd be able to get a mission like that up there?

Maths and Physics are interlinked, you can't have one without the other. True, the experts don't yet know the workings of black holes, and may never do, or the Higgs Boson among other things but at least people like those at CERN are trying to understand these things.

Ardent

I'm criticising the field of physics at all! And I know maths is an important part of physics and astronomical science. They say that calculations based on Newton's age old laws of gravity were all that was needed to send a manned space ship to the Moon.

What I'm questioning are the claims of Hawking and Susskind and whether or not you can actually apply maths to define something inside which all the known laws of physics break down.

djhaxman

Ok, sorry about that. Thought you were on the wind-up.

MagicMarker

Probably should have opened this in the physics forum.

AugustusMinimus

Ardent wrote: »

I'm criticising the field of physics at all! And I know maths is an important part of physics and astronomical science. They say that calculations based on Newton's age old laws of gravity were all that was needed to send a manned space ship to the Moon.

What I'm questioning are the claims of Hawking and Susskind and whether or not you can actually apply maths to define something inside which all the known laws of physics break down.

The laws of physics don't break down at all.

Our understanding of them does. What those two guys are putting forward are theories. They cannot be proved until tested in reality. However, it simply isn't possible to test stuff which happens inside a black hole.