SWAB: “Singularities don’t exist,” claims black hole pioneer Roy Kerr

[SkyHiker]

Of the few solutions to Einstein's field equations, the Kerr metric of a rotating black hole is the most impressive one. 60 years after its inception, Roy Kerr wrote another very interesting paper claiming that several claims about singularities inside a black hole by some of the great minds are wrong.

Whereas the Schwarzschild metric is quite simple, the mathematics of the Kerr metric are very difficult. Many relativists tried deriving it for decades and failed, until finally, Kerr solved it in 1963. Isn't it wonderful that, at 89, the same genius writes another groundbreaking paper that questions the existence of singularities in black holes? He adds that he doesn't believe in singularities in general. That would include the Big Bang, I presume.

[KathyNS]

Our late member nFA used to maintain that a singularity was a mathematical result indicating that the theory was incomplete. Intuitively, that seems to be correct. A singularity is like dividing by zero: you can talk about it, and it may be the limiting condition of some mathematical entity, but the result is meaningless.

[SkyHiker]

Some interesting remarks in the Final Thoughts section: You can't assume that a singularity exists without showing how it was created. For instance, it is easy to show the Schwarzschild metric (with singularity) for a non-rotating black hole, but the creation of it was shown by Oppenheimer only decades later. Until then, it should be considered fiction. It is still fiction, probably, for some other reason since it assumes perfect symmetry, meaning no rotation, which has a probability of zero.

The Big Bang model was motivated by calculating backwards in time assuming the cosmological principle. Following the same line of thought about realism, for it to be realistic you would have to show how the Big Bang originates by calculating forward in time. The cyclic models that do that, appear to be speculative. That suggests that we can't assume that it is real even when the standard model makes pretty good predictions.

BTW, why did Kerr not win a Nobel prize long ago for his monumental achievement?