b…@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote in message <news:au6bv5$r73$1@glue.ucr.edu>…
> More mathematically elegant, eh?
> What is this solution – how does it work, exactly?
See the paper [1] which is only 4 pages long, but a news article [2]
about these gravastars mentions some reasons why experts are skeptical
about the idea of gravastars, although the article also states:
"But other astronomers are intrigued, both because black holes
themselves remain mere theory, not fact, and because gravastars might
explain strange physical observations that black holes don’t."
> Finally, you are asking the impossible if you expect astronomers
> to find "clear evidence of Hawking radiation" in typical black hole
> candidate.
I wasn’t expecting the astronomers to have detected any "clear
evidence of Hawking radiation", and this was partially my point.
> In your articles, you refer to lots of papers on the preprint arXiv.
> I often wish you could spend more time checking the details of these
> papers before citing them. Some of them make sense. Others don’t.
> Many are in the grey zone somewhere between these extremes. It makes
> me very nervous how you sometimes lump them all together without
> distinction! For example, when you cite Mitra’s papers along with a
> bunch of others, it makes me feel I can’t trust *any* of them.
But you don’t have to be nervous because you are not clueless ! And
if it should turn out that loop QG is correct and that string theory
is false then perhaps up to 60-85% of the papers on hep-th could be
flawed !
I am not citing papers in some kind of official way, but just
mentioning ideas for potential discussion. You need to be both
skeptical and open-minded to be able to adapt to new ideas, and e.g.
Lubos Motl used to be quite critical of loop QG but because he is very
bright he has been able to adapt and to consider what may be an
important new finding in loop QG, i.e. Dreyer’s result.
Also, Abdus Salam would consider any idea that someone brought to him
because he was smart and confident enough to feel that he could see if
something should or must be wrong. If something were easily and
obviously wrong then he could ignore it, but otherwise he knew that he
might still learn something from a theory that turned out to be wrong.
For instance, there is a paper [3] which looks at a binary pulsar and
concludes that gravitational radiation cannot exist. I recently saw a
paper on Reissner-Nordstrom black holes which discussed the effects of
gravitational radiation back-reaction which makes me wonder if the
author of [3] has even considered the possibility of gravitational
radiation back-reaction.
I don’t know much of anything about binary pulsar systems, so even if
paper [3] is wrong I still might learn something such as where the
effect of gravitational radiation back-reaction should arise and to
what extent (assuming that people with more expertise can discuss this
for me).
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0109035
[2] http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/gravastars_020423.html
[3] http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0211481