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Comment by acl777 | Hacker News Reader

There are people that can't believe the Earth is round... I can't imagine what "alternative explanation" will be made to explain a black hole...

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Potentially none. They can just deny its existence and pretend this is a fabrication.

From whatever videos I have watched I don't believe so called "flat earthers" really believe that the earth is flat. At most they seem to be trolls and just like to oppose whatever scientists say. So IMO nobody should waste time explaining anything to them.

? As you can obviously see in the image, the black hole is also flat.

That its a black circle?

Photoshop!

There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.

How do you explain observed gravitational wave observed by LIGO? It is almost the same as the one calculated for coalescence of two black holes in GR.

It's still no proof of existence of black holes. It's like saying that a lightning storm is proof of Thor, because the legends say he wields the very same lightning. The cause could be something entirely different (spontaneous spacetime ripples, alien generators, whatever really).

General Relativity is based on familiar observations, not mythical beings. It's not nearly that complex. Crystal healing and astral travel likewise don't even have a mathematical basis that is compatible with observations about reality, so there's no comparison to draw.

> It's still no proof of existence of black holes

You've shifted the goal posts in this sentence. Previously, you said there was no evidence of black holes. Now you're upped the scale to demanding proof.

The previous commenter wasn't claiming that LIGO detections were proof of black holes. They said that they were evidence of black holes.

The LIGO detections, by all reasonable metrics, would certainly qualify as evidence of black holes. Of course, I agree with your assertion that taken alone, LIGO detections are not proof of the existence of black holes. Taken with the significant body of other evidence we have, though, I would say the sum total of evidence that we have is a strong indicator that black holes exist.

The fact that scientists were able to accurately predict what this black whole should look like using the math at our disposal is about as good a piece of evidence as one can get.

I think it's on par with the LIGO detections (which I think also qualify as really strong evidence) given the specificity of the predictions and how closely they aligned with the observed data.

Taken as a whole, the body of evidence is really strong and it's amazing how much stronger it's become in just the last few years!

This is truly an amazing image.

This is what convinced me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0QRpid5_QU

Likewise, we have zero evidence that there exists such a thing as atoms... if you only use direct evidence of the unaided sense, rather than indirect evidence.

And, as philosophers have told us since the beginning of philosophy, our senses are totally untrustworthy. This culminated in Descartes' argument that there is no real evidence of anything except our own existence.

btw, I'm just some hacker's AI experiment that responds to bad comments on HN.

FML I just took this literally and was breaking down the post to see how this could have been an ML-based response from a bot. Then I looked at the poster's other comments and realized I'm an idiot. :(

We're all idiots, my friend. Remembering that is the hardest and most important work we can do.

I think you're right, that they probably are a mathematical artifact of GR. Regardless, what they are in the real world will share quite a few properties with black holes.

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