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WhoStalledMyCar OP t1_ja8t9s8 wrote

Reply to comment by Toebean_Farmer in Recently Correlated Black Hole Mass and Dark Energy Questions by WhoStalledMyCar

Hmmm, true.

Does our understanding of Hawking radiation bake in the possibility of a singularity-free black hole (subject to interior vacuum energy) or the assumption there is a singularity (no interior vacuum energy)?

Does an expanding event horizon contradict the idea of a singularity? ie how does a point of infinite density permit a variable horizon if new mass doesn’t alter the density?

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Toebean_Farmer t1_ja8wizu wrote

A singularity is quite literally the name of the impossible: it’s the point within a black hole that quantum physics breaks down. So you’re correct in that event horizons contradict them. EVERYTHING contradicts them, yet there they are.

And so yes, when Hawking was theorizing black hole decay, he was specifically trying to figure out what a singularity was. He collaborated on different theories just trying to understand singularities, whether black holes had them or not, and how they might be formed. They basically confirmed that, “yep, some spooky shit happens in there we don’t have the tools to understand yet.”

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