Related papers: Regarding the "Hole Argument"
This is an explanation and defense of "mathematical conceptualism" for a general mathematical and philosophical audience. I make a case that it is cogent, rigorous, attractive, and better suited to ordinary mathematical practice than all…
Since Stephen Hawking's original 1975 paper on black hole evaporation, there has been a consensus that the problem of "loss of information" is both deep and troubling. It is also thought that resolution of the problem may hold some…
The black hole information paradox arises from an apparent conflict between the Hawking black hole radiation and the fact that time evolution in quantum mechanics is unitary. The trouble is that while the former suggests that information of…
I review elements of the foundations of black-hole theory with attention to problematic issues, and describe some techniques which either seem to help with the difficulties or at least investigate their scope. The definition of black holes…
We study static, spherically symmetric, Skyrme black holes in the context of the assumption that they can be viewed as bound states between ordinary bare black holes and solitons. This assumption and results stemming from the isolated…
We review the arguments and counter arguments about the recent proposal for generic censorship violation. In particular the argument made in gr-qc/0405050 against our proposal for a possible expanding domain wall that could encompass a…
I distinguish between two versions of the black hole information-loss paradox. The first arises from apparent failure of unitarity on the spacetime of a completely evaporating black hole, which appears to be non-globally-hyperbolic; this is…
In many real-life situations that involve exchanges of arguments, individuals may differ on their assessment of which supports between the arguments are in fact justified, i.e., they put forward different support-relations. When confronted…
We address a recent proposal concerning 'surplus structure' due to Nguyen et al. ['Why Surplus Structure is Not Superfluous.' Br. J. Phi. Sci. Forthcoming.] We argue that the sense of 'surplus structure' captured by their formal criterion…
The concept of informal mathematical proof considered in intuitionism is apparently vulnerable to a version of the liar paradox. However, a careful reevaluation of this concept reveals a subtle error whose correction blocks the…
Black hole firewall paradox is an inconsistency between four postulates in black hole physics: (1) the unitary evolution in quantum systems, (2) application of the semi-classical field theory in low curvature backgrounds, (3) statistical…
Recently, several ways of obtaining observational proof of the existence of black-hole horizons have been proposed. We argue here that such proof is fundamentally impossible: observations can provide arguments, sometimes very strong ones,…
The theory of measurement is employed to elucidate the physical basis of general relativity. For measurements involving phenomena with intrinsic length or time scales, such scales must in general be negligible compared to the (translational…
This article re-examines Lawvere's abstract, category-theoretic proof of the fixed-point theorem whose contrapositive is a `universal' diagonal argument. The main result is that the necessary axioms for both the fixed-point theorem and the…
I discuss the ontological assumptions and implications of General Relativity. I maintain that General Relativity is a theory about gravitational fields, not about space-time. The latter is a more basic ontological category, that emerges…
This article reviews some aspects in the current relationship between mathematical and numerical General Relativity. Focus is placed on the description of isolated systems, with a particular emphasis on recent developments in the study of…
The halting problem is considered to be an essential part of the theoretical background to computing. That halting is not in general computable has supposedly been proved in many text books and taught on many computer science courses, in…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
Three recent arguments seek to show that the universal applicability of unitary quantum theory is inconsistent with the assumption that a well-conducted measurement always has a definite physical outcome. In this paper I restate and analyze…
An attempt is made in order to clarify the so called regular black holes issue. It is revisited that if one works within General Relativity minimally coupled with non linear source, mainly of electromagnetic origin, and within a static…