[David Cooper (OP)]

You have a series of masses, say 1 cm radius black holes (a bit more massive than Earth each).
There's some threshold of (coordinate) separation where the line is either a series of distinct masses, or is one large mass (regardless of the number of them that you put in the line).  So we presume the separation is greater than that, so they're spaced over 2cm apart. Any less than that and the mass of any pair of adjacent ones is greater than their mutual Schwarzchild radius since the latter is directly proportional to mass (well, at least for the two of them in isolation). So any finite line of these masses will have a Schwarzchild radius greater than the length of the line, and thus it will just be one big black hole.

Clearly we want them just far enough to remain separate, so when the ones going the opposite way move into the spaces in between they'll increase the energy density and trigger them all to extend towards each other such that the edges of the discs don't initially need to be on direct lines for collision. The high speed at which they pass each other could prevent the propagation of changes to the shapes of the gravity wells so much though that they might not reach out in time to link up. That's what makes this whole thing dependent on simulation.

So they're further apart than 2 cm.  When the oncoming 2nd line of BHs comes on, for a moment they'll be one line with half the separation between them. Same story. If that new half-separation is under 2cm, both lines become one black hole and nothing gets out.

But with a long line of separate singularities inside that long black hole which are still moving along paths that will take them further apart again and break the event horizon back into separate units with one per singularity.

If they're one big black hole, then there's no meaningful coordinate 'speed of halting'.

It isn't a normal black hole, and it isn't a normal merger of two either. In a normal merger there are two singularities inside a single event horizon and they're moving ever closer together. In my scenario though, there are lots of singularities in there moving along paths that will not bring them together. This is something that may never have been explored.

Said photon was never inside any EH then, by definition. See my very first sentence of my first reply. You're positing this photon outrunning a null surface, which requires it to move faster than light, a self contradiction.

Like I said, this may never have been explored and you may be in for a surprise. The photon isn't outrunning a null surface - a chunk of space that's inside an event horizon simply loses energy density and the event horizon migrates past the photon and disappears, leaving the photon outside the black holes.




[I like the list of "similar topics" underneath: Do white sheep eat more than black sheep?]

[Halc]

But with a long line of separate singularities inside that long black hole

There's no 'long black hole'. If you put the little ones close enough together, you get one black hole, and the event horizon of it is more or less spherical (assuming minimal total angular momentum). There's no such thing as a line of barely linked black holes. I spelled out why in my prior post, which perhaps you're not bothering to read. Tell me why my explanation is wrong if it is, but don't just keep repeating refuted stuff. I lay no claim to be necessarily right on this stuff.

It isn't a normal black hole, and it isn't a normal merger of two either. In a normal merger there are two singularities inside a single event horizon

No. Per no-hair theorem, there's no external difference distinguishing one arrangement from another. Black holes have mass, charge, and angular momentum. They don't have different shapes due to internal arrangements of matter/singularities. Your entire line is in a one black hole. It cannot differ from another black hole with the same mass/momentum/charge. It cannot separate into two parts any more than a normal one.

This is something that may never have been explored.

Per above theorem, it has been explored, and proven otherwise.

[I like the list of "similar topics" underneath: Do white sheep eat more than black sheep?]

Ah, the wonders of low-AI word matching. @neilep would love the topic, and sure enough, was the first to reply.

Answer is obviously yes since there's so many more white sheep mouths to feed than the black ones.

[Bored chemist]

Once something is in  a black hole, nothing can pull it out- not even another black hole.

[Eternal Student]

Hi again.

The correct answer involves coming up with a metric describing this that is a solution to Einstein's field equations, but that is beyond either of us.

     That much I agree with.  As Halc and I implied in earlier posts - you do want to be using General Relativity and considering a solution to the EFE.   Assuming a set of black holes in close proximity remain as anything that would be recognisable or behave as a collection of ordinary individual black holes is a poor assumption.
    I wouldn't be trying to find a valid solution for the EFE in such a situation either and I'm not sure anyone would.   I had the impression that the models of what are just 2 black holes (let alone an infinite number of black holes) orbiting each other and then merging are usually just numerical solutions or approximations for the EFE in such situations and not an exact analytical solution.   BUT I'm no expert and maybe someone does have an anlytical solution for such mergers.   Even if such an analytical solution exists I'll bet it's idealised and applies to a very specific set of initial conditions and all we've been doing is generalising from this. (Evidence: We are still finding new things like "lopsided" mergers resulting in the final black hole being given a significant recoil velocity when the incident black holes had unequal masses and spins.    https://www.space.com/black-hole-escaping-galaxy-from-collision ).

But some naive reasoning may still apply.

   Yes, I'll go along with this and just try and keep an eye on where that reasoning might go astray.

When the oncoming 2nd line of BHs comes on, for a moment they'll be one line with half the separation between them.

    Of course, we don't know that.   The trouble with General Relativity is that when you move masses around they don't move to some new piece of space in a nice predictable way like Newtonian mechanics would suggest and space has been left unchanged.   In General Relativity, you can't avoid completely changing the nature of space when the mass is re-distributed.
    So, using a simple Newtonian view, it looks like there should be a moment when the two lines of black holes are just one line with half the separation between them  but in reality the metric is completely different at that time with the masses distributed in this way - so the separation between the black holes could be.... well... anything.

High speed of passing doesn't help. If anything, that just adds energy and makes it more likely to be that one big BH

   I very nearly said something like that - before deciding it just wasn't all that simple.   I completely agree with the sentiment, I'm just not sure that the speed of travel of a black hole is a good measure of any "energy density" that you would want to include in the stress-energy tensor.   In particular, it may not describe the kinetic energy of a black hole because it isn't really describing the velocity of any part of the black hole through the space that is local to it.
       @David Cooper  has repeatedly asked if the speed of travel of the black holes would make a difference and somehow allow the black holes to separate again or get past each other without merging.   This has never been an easy question to answer.

      If the two black holes approach each other and a shared, connected event horizon forms around what was previously recognisable as the two separate sources of gravitation,  then all of the people who have replied on this thread   (Halc, Bored Chemist and I) are of the opinion that there is no way that event horizon is ever going to separate again and leave what is recognisable as two separate black holes moving away from each other.
   We could argue this purely on the basis on what the formal definition of an "event horizon" is.   Halc mentioned this right in one of his earliest replies and Bored Chemist seems to have been consistently using this formal definition of what an event horizon should be.   
     In astrophysics, an event horizon is a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer

[Definition taken from Wikipedia]

    So, exactly as has been stated in earlier posts - if a photon was on the wrong side of a genuine "event horizon" then it cannot ever reach an observer who was on the other side of that event horizon.

   The sort of thing @David Cooper has been talking about would not have been a genuine "event horizon".   By definition there cannot be any event horizons which only temporarily constrain a photon but at a later time allow it to pass through and reach an observer who was on the other side.    However, we can imagine a dynamic metric existing (one which varies with co-ordinate time such as a gravitational wave solution for the EFE),  so that there is a surface through spacetime where space is flowing past that surface at the speed of light for only a finite amount of co-ordinate time.   To say it another way, for a short amount of co-ordinate time, time-like paths across that surface can only take objects from region I to region II but not from region II to region I.   This, I think is David Cooper's notion of how a photon could be temporarily inside the "event horizon" but then re-emerge if and when the two black holes do manage to pass each other.      Formally, the photon was not inside a genuine "event horizon", it was only inside a surface where time-like paths did not exist to the region of spacetime exterior to the surface for a small amount of co-ordinate time.   I don't think there is any terminology that is commonly used to describe such a surface.     In summary, you  ( @David Cooper ) have led everyone to a certain conclusion by using the terminology "event horizon" and suggesting that the event horizons of two black holes could merge and form a combined event horizon for a while.    As stated in the very earliest replies, if a photon was on the wrong side of a genuine event horizon, then there isn't any calculation or carefull consideration that needs to be done - by definition it is never getting to an observer outside that event horizon.

   I was going to discuss how the speed of travel might affect the merger of two black holes but I'll do that in another post (if at all), since this one is already quite long.

Best Wishes.

[Eternal Student]

Hi again.

   So @David Cooper  has repeatedly asked if the speed of travel of a black hole can make a difference to whether the singularities will ultimately merge when the two black holes are made to pass close to each other.

   There have been a few replies based on various things and everyone has basically said  "no",   the most important thing would seem to be how close the black holes get.
    Let's qualify some of this:  In the big picture I don't see why we need to worry about both black holes having high speeds of travel.   We might just as well use a different co-ordinate system so that one black hole is considered to be stationary and only the other black hole is travelling.   A similar argument applies to the long lines of black holes that David Cooper was considering -  one of those lines can be considered as stationary.
    We do expect the speed of travel of a black hole to have some effect on the process of the two black holes merging.   If the incoming black hole has a high speed of travel then you'd expect the two black holes to orbit around each other for longer and at a greater distance,  steadily losing energy through gravitational radiation until eventually the conventional merging process is observed.   If the incoming black hole had a very high speed of travel and it doesn't pass too close to the other black hole then they might even have a hyperbolic encounter and the incoming black hole escapes to infinity and never merges with the other black hole.   Additionally, if the incoming black hole had a high initial speed of travel then you'd expect the final merged black hole that is produced to have more spin (angular momentum).  So there are some ways in which the speed of travel of a black hole would affect the merging process.
   However, you (David Cooper) seem to be intent on considering an encounter between two black holes where they are deliberately made to get too close to each other,  i.e. where one black hole was almost on a direct collision course with the other black hole.
    I think the notion of a "speed of travel" for a black hole is only useful and usefully defined for a distant observer and assigning a high or low initial "speed of travel" for black holes which do actually come into close proximity with each other makes very little difference to what happens locally around those black holes.
- - - - - - - -

How fast does a black hole move?
   Let's consider a large region of empty space with just one simple black hole in it.  So this is going to be described with the Schwarzschild solution.   Now I did say empty space but I'm going to want an observer in it, as usual we'll assume they are of such small mass that they don't affect the solution of the EFE at all.
    We'll have the observer at a large distance from the black hole and without wasting too much time, we'll have them use the Schwarzschild co-ordinates to describe the space around them.   So the black hole is stationary, it's not moving through space, as far the observer is concerned.   The black hole retains a constant set of spatial co-ordinates at all times.   The "speed of travel" of that black hole is 0 for the distant observer.
    If we want to consider a black hole that is moving through space, that's easily done.   We'll just have the observer convert the spherical co-ordinate system they were using  (t, r, θ, φ) that was based on the Schwarzschild co-ordinates into a Cartesian system  (t, x, y, z) centred around the observer and then apply a Lorentz boost to that co-ordinate system.   So to paraphrase this,  we don't really need to give the black hole any movement we can just have the observer move through space instead and use a new co-ordinate system in which the observer would still consider themselves to be at rest.   In this co-ordinate system the black hole has a "speed of travel" through space that is not 0 as far the observer is concerned.
    The "speed of travel" of a black hole is just a co-ordinate dependant thing, it depends on the co-ordinates that a distant observer was using.   That's nothing special or unique to black holes, we can say the same about any object that is distant from the observer and might be moving.   The objects speed depends on the co-ordinates that the observer is using.   All we need to keep in mind is just that the "speed of travel" of a black hole may not be telling you as much as you might have thought.   It is just telling you something about how the co-ordinates that a distant observer might assign to the black hole change with time.
    Now if space is just flat Minkowski space, then when an observer changes the frame of reference they use, it does result in a distant object moving through less (or more) of what the observer considers to be static space in exactly the way you would expect.   Specifically, the frame of reference can be extended to cover the region of space around that distant object and then the distant object has a certain speed through that bit of space local to it which will be exactly what you'd expect.   For example, if in one frame of reference, the distant object had a velocity, v, through the space local to it, then the observer can boost to a new frame of reference with offset velocity v and then when they examine that distant object it will have 0 velocity through what the observer now considers to be the static local space around that distant object.
     However, the same does not hold for Black holes and it is simply because space is certainly not flat Minkowski space when you get close to the black hole.   In General relativity you can't extend an inertial frame of reference to cover all of space.   However, all is not lost:   At every point in spacetime you can always find a local inertial frame.   So let's just start by having the distant observer try to use a co-ordinate system where we would naively think that the black hole is moving as slowly through space as possible.   Let's have the black hole have 0 "speed of travel" for the distant observer - that can be done by having the distant observer describe space with the Schwarzschild co-ordinates as set out earlier in this discussion.
     Now let's have a point, p, that stays on the event horizon of the black hole and let's set-up a local inertial frame there and see how fast that point must be moving through the space that is local to it.
EDITING:   This post is already too long, let's not do it but instead just refer any reader to standard texts on the Schwarzschild solution and just jump straight to some diagrams like all the Pop Sci articles would do.
   The Schwarzschild solution can be thought of as if space is flowing across the event horizon and towards the singularity.   Here's the diagram:

   
Here's a more relevant, if less aesthetically pleasing, diagram:



At the event horizon, the local space is flowing across the event horizon at the speed of light, c.   It will be more useful for us to consider this the other way round:  The event horizon is moving through space, it has the velocity c  through the space that is local to it.    This is how it will be in EVERY local inertial frame you set up around the point, p, that stays on the event horizon.   You can try to find another local inertial frame, for example, by applying a Lorentz boost but it won't help.   If something has the speed c  in one inertial frame then this is an invariant,  it will have that speed in EVERY inertial frame.    Just to phrase this more strongly:   You cannot find a local inertial frame centred on a point on the event horizon where the event horizon is travelling at any speed other than c.

   Now let's step back a moment to consider what effect the "speed of travel" that a distant observer might have assigned to a black hole can have on what happens locally around a black hole.   Well.... basically....nothing.... it makes not a jot of difference as far as I can see.   Any local inertial frame you set up on the event horizon will show you that the event horizon is moving through space at the speed c.     The distant observer might naively try and slow that down by boosting to another frame of reference and changing the "speed of travel" of the black hole but it doesn't help.   There's nothing you can do with the local inertial frame at the event horizon, you can try and boost that in the same way as the distant observer boosted their frame but it doesn't help or matter at all.  There's no local inertial frame at the event horizon where it travels at any speed other than c.

     Anyway, how does this apply to the merging of two black holes?  I don't think the "speed of travel" that the two black holes had initially tells you anything about what is happening locally around the black holes.   It certainly doesn't affect their speed or movement through space that is local to the black hole.   The "speed of travel" of a black hole is just something a distant observer can measure as described much earlier in this post and it is just an artifact of a particular co-ordinate choice.    When and if the two black holes come into close proximity,  I don't see how the two black holes can approach each other at a speed through local space that is anything other than c.     In particular, I can see no reason to think that assigning the two black holes a high "speed of travel" initially is going to affect what happens locally where and when the black holes merge.

Best Wishes.

[David Cooper (OP)]

But with a long line of separate singularities inside that long black hole

There's no 'long black hole'. If you put the little ones close enough together, you get one black hole, and the event horizon of it is more or less spherical (assuming minimal total angular momentum). There's no such thing as a line of barely linked black holes. I spelled out why in my prior post, which perhaps you're not bothering to read. Tell me why my explanation is wrong if it is, but don't just keep repeating refuted stuff. I lay no claim to be necessarily right on this stuff.

If you have a long line of black holes which suddenly link up, they cannot immediately become a single spherical black hole. The length of the line cannot reduce at the moment of contact to the right size of event horizon for a united singularity of the total mass, and the width cannot instantly burst out to that diameter either - it has to take time to adjust. If the line of black holes is infinite, they will never make that adjustment as there is an equal pull to either side on each singularity. Even if you introduce tiny differences, some of  the singularities will merge, but they'll end up further away from the nearest ones that move away from them to merge, and again the event horizons must disconnect as the energy density where they had only just managed to join up has now fallen.

It isn't a normal black hole, and it isn't a normal merger of two either. In a normal merger there are two singularities inside a single event horizon

No. Per no-hair theorem, there's no external difference distinguishing one arrangement from another. Black holes have mass, charge, and angular momentum. They don't have different shapes due to internal arrangements of matter/singularities. Your entire line is in a one black hole. It cannot differ from another black hole with the same mass/momentum/charge. It cannot separate into two parts any more than a normal one.

There is a difference, and it is already known that there is during black hole mergers where there are two distinct singularities within the same event horizon for some time as they cannot instantly become a single one at the moment of first event horizon contact. That will also show up in the gravitational waves.

This is something that may never have been explored.

Per above theorem, it has been explored, and proven otherwise.

If people with your level of understanding can imagine that singularities can move billions of lightyears in an instant to merge with others as soon as a chain of event horizons touch, then it seems more than possible that this has not been adequately explored.

[David Cooper (OP)]

As Halc and I implied in earlier posts - you do want to be using General Relativity and considering a solution to the EFE.

As I mentioned earlier, whatever happens here with external observations will be the same for LET as it is for GTR (ignoring any complications caused by the space inside the event horizon being full of stuff in LET, which means that if two event horizons can be made to disconnect there could be a lot of material liberated from both black holes, which is how this experiment could reveal something about what happens inside black holes if it or something like it could be done for real). This means that an LET analysis of events as these two lines of black holes approach each other is fully valid - all the action will map to the GTR analysis of the same action and provide the exact same 3D Euclidean view to the external observer. The black holes do all look flattened to discs and they do not interact until they are almost level with each other as their entire gravity wells can be flattened to behave like discs too.

Assuming a set of black holes in close proximity remain as anything that would be recognisable or behave as a collection of ordinary individual black holes is a poor assumption.

It isn't - what I've described right up until that moment of first interaction will be precisely as I've described it when simulated under both LET and GTR.

So, exactly as has been stated in earlier posts - if a photon was on the wrong side of a genuine "event horizon" then it cannot ever reach an observer who was on the other side of that event horizon.

When a rule is based on an assumption (e.g. there are no black swans), no amount of insisting that the rule must be right because it's a rule will alter the fact that it's just an assumption. In all the cases previously looked at, it appeared that nothing could get from inside an event horizon to outside that event horizon, but there may be cases in which that becomes false. When someone proposes such a case, it isn't defeated by asserting that it cannot happen because there's a rule against it and that the rule must be right because it's a rule. The rule is an assumption which has stood the test of time for a very long time, just as the one about there being no black swans did.

The sort of thing @David Cooper has been talking about would not have been a genuine "event horizon".

It most certainly would be genuine. The event horizon goes where the distribution of energy density puts it. In LET, that's where the speed of light (which reduces in gravity wells under that theory instead of cramming extra space in) falls to zero (relative to the black hole). As two black holes approach each other in a normal merger, the event horizons extend out towards each other and connect up due to the increased energy density acting on that space. In GTR the event horizon is a thing of no substance beyond curvature of spacetime, but the depth of that location in the gravity will fall and will go below the altitude of an event horizon, so it qualifies as a genuine event horizon in GTR too.

By definition there cannot be any event horizons which only temporarily constrain a photon but at a later time allow it to pass through and reach an observer who was on the other side.

Your definition is a black swan rule. Don't let rules based on assumptions block your ability to explore what actual physics does.

[David Cooper (OP)]

We might just as well use a different co-ordinate system so that one black hole is considered to be stationary and only the other black hole is travelling.   A similar argument applies to the long lines of black holes that David Cooper was considering -  one of those lines can be considered as stationary.

You can indeed, and that will help show the extreme interaction when the lines of black holes begin to interact, providing a slow motion view of that. The results will be identical. In the view with both lines passing each other at what appears to be a relative speed of almost 2c, the interaction might only begin during the last fraction of a second before the two lines are on a single line if we've compressed their gravity wells sufficiently. When you view it while moving along at the speed of one of those two lines though, you'll see the other line of black holes approach the other at nearly c and it would then appear to take a very long time to move through the gravity wells of the stationary line of black holes before the two lines become for a moment a single line. If we assume that the only material in the black holes is in singularities though, what will those interactions look like? How can they be brought to a halt. Maybe all that extra energy that they're carrying from their extreme speed of travel has a role in this. A massive object doesn't collapse into a black hole due to its relativistic mass from its speed of travel, but if it's all brought to a sudden halt and is already within the event horizon, that could grow the size of the black hole as all that movement energy needs to be expressed in some other way. That might be worth exploring.

However, you (David Cooper) seem to be intent on considering an encounter between two black holes where they are deliberately made to get too close to each other,  i.e. where one black hole was almost on a direct collision course with the other black hole.

The idea is to consider a case where they are on paths that will miss each other but pass close, while the pull to either side on the singularities is always equal, forcing them to stick to the paths they're on. For the black holes to merge, the singularities will need to be halted, and then they can try to merge from there within a unified event horizon without it breaking up.

I think the notion of a "speed of travel" for a black hole is only useful and usefully defined for a distant observer and assigning a high or low initial "speed of travel" for black holes which do actually come into close proximity with each other makes very little difference to what happens locally around those black holes.

If you want to understand the action, it's useful to imagine the speeds of approach and to understand that everything that needs to be done to halt the singularities must be done within a fraction of a second when measuring from the frame of reference in which you expect the unified black hole to end up at rest, while nothing can propagate faster than the speed of light in that frame.

Anyway, how does this apply to the merging of two black holes?  I don't think the "speed of travel" that the two black holes had initially tells you anything about what is happening locally around the black holes.   It certainly doesn't affect their speed or movement through space that is local to the black hole.   The "speed of travel" of a black hole is just something a distant observer can measure as described much earlier in this post and it is just an artifact of a particular co-ordinate choice.    When and if the two black holes come into close proximity,  I don't see how the two black holes can approach each other at a speed through local space that is anything other than c.     In particular, I can see no reason to think that assigning the two black holes a high "speed of travel" initially is going to affect what happens locally where and when the black holes merge.

Nevertheless, whatever happens with the interactions between the black holes, the external observer sees them travel along straight paths in opposite directions and their event horizons touch while the singularities are forced to continue along those straight paths, so if they are to remain within the same event horizon they need to be halted, and fast. If they aren't halted, the energy density half way between any pair of these singularities will fall again and lead to those locations no longer being within the event horizon, even though they were in it at the moment of closest approach. The action may be too complex for anyone to run sufficiently accurately in their head for them to be sure of the outcome until they've seen a detailed computer simulation of it, so it may not be possible to resolve without finding someone who already has software that can handle it and which doesn't override anything with no-black-swan rules, or without writing such software, which would not be an easy task, so I don't expect definitive answers in the near future.

[Eternal Student]

Hi.

As I mentioned earlier, whatever happens here with external observations will be the same for LET as it is for GTR

    You've mentioned LET several times.   Is that Lorentz Ether Theory?     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory
    As far as I can see, this remains a fringe theory, with Special Relativity being the preferred mainstream theory.   In 2012 there was apparently a viable Lorentz-invariant treatment of gravity added to the theory.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory#Lorentz-invariant_gravitational_law .      However, General Relativity still seems to be the preferred mainstream theory for gravity.

This means that an LET analysis of events as these two lines of black holes approach each other is fully valid - all the action will map to the GTR analysis of the same action and provide the exact same 3D Euclidean view to the external observer.

       You may need to provide some references or more details for this.   What you seem to have done is apply some results from special relativity only and not utilize whatever the LET version of a theory of gravity might be.

For example, you stated this:

If the line of black holes is infinite, they will never make that adjustment as there is an equal pull to either side on each singularity.

     The idea of a "pull" or a force being applied is a Newtonian version of gravity.   Gravity is not a force under General Relativity.

There is a difference, and it is already known that there is during black hole mergers where there are two distinct singularities within the same event horizon for some time as they cannot instantly become a single one at the moment of first event horizon contact. That will also show up in the gravitational waves.

    The exact details may not be entirely right but the general idea is actually OK.   @Halc mentioned the no-hair theorem but this actually only applies to what are recognisable as conventional stationary Black Hole solutions and not to the unusual sources of gravitation that exist just before two black holes have merged (for example when gravitational waves are present).
 

.... we have a no-hair theorem:

       Stationary, asymptotically flat black hole solutions to general relativity coupled to electromagnetism that are nonsingular outside the event horizon are fully characterised by the parameters of mass, electric and magnetic charge and angular momentum.

    Stationary solutions are of special interest because we expect them to be the end states of gravitational collapse.   The alternative might be some sort of oscillating configuration, but oscillations will ultimately be damped as energy is lost through the emission of gravitational radiation, in fact, typical evolutions will evolve quite rapidly to a stationary configuration. 

[Extract taken from p. 238,  Spacetime and Geometry,  Sean Carroll ]

   The problem is, I think, that you (@ David Cooper ) previously referred to an arrangement of one long line of singularities as being one Black Hole.   You can't then blame Halc for assuming it was an ordinary Black Hole, i.e. an ordinary stationary solution of the EFE that is asymptotically flat.

   This brings me to another point about definitions and the use of existing terminology:

  ES said:  By definition there cannot be any event horizons which only temporarily constrain a photon but at a later time allow it to pass through and reach an observer who was on the other side.

DC replied:  Your definition is a black swan rule. Don't let rules based on assumptions block your ability to explore what actual physics does.

    It's a definition not a rule.   It's also not "my" definition, the extract I quoted came from Wikipedia.  That particular definition is based on something Rindler developed in about 1950.
    The physics is safe - if there is some physics to explain then it can be done by describing it with another term like  an "orange horizon" or something else.    However, if you use the term "Event Horizon" then people will (and they did seem to) think you were describing the thing that is given by the definition much as described in that Wikipedia article.   Actually there are other definitions of an "event horizon" that you could use - but if you are doing this, then you would be advised to set out the definition you are using because the definition as set out by Rindler (approx. 1950) is the mainstream definition.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  ES said:   I think the notion of a "speed of travel" for a black hole is only useful and usefully defined for a distant observer and assigning a high or low initial "speed of travel" for black holes which do actually come into close proximity with each other makes very little difference to what happens locally around those black holes.

DC replied: If you want to understand the action, it's useful to imagine the speeds of approach and to understand that everything that needs to be done to halt the singularities must be done within a fraction of a second when measuring from the frame of reference in which you expect the unified black hole to end up at rest, while nothing can propagate faster than the speed of light in that frame.

   I get the impression that in your analysis (which you stated is based on LET),   the black holes are very much being considered as something like billiard balls moving through a fixed static space which seems to be described by the co-ordinate system in which the black holes are said to have a speed of approach.   
   In General Relativity something different can happen.   The black holes aren't just billiard balls moving through a static space.   They are something which changes the nature of space around them.   As the two black holes approach each other they can be slowed down (or sped up) relative to each other because the metric of space between them was not describing flat space and futhermore  it wasn't even static - it has been changing with co-ordinate time while the black holes approached.   So the co-ordinate separation between them isn't describing what it used to describe.  The velocity vector of an object does change as it travels through curved space so the black holes can have their velocities completely changed while they are approaching each other.   

Best Wishes.

[David Cooper (OP)]

    You've mentioned LET several times.   Is that Lorentz Ether Theory?     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory
    As far as I can see, this remains a fringe theory, with Special Relativity being the preferred mainstream theory.   In 2012 there was apparently a viable Lorentz-invariant treatment of gravity added to the theory.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory#Lorentz-invariant_gravitational_law .      However, General Relativity still seems to be the preferred mainstream theory for gravity.

The two theories map to each other perfectly when it comes to predictions of the visible action from outside black holes, but they diverge when describing the action inside them. LET has the speed of light reduce in gravity wells instead of packing extra space into them, so instead of light taking longer to pass a massive body by having that light follow a lengthened path while maintaining the speed c throughout, LET simply has the light move more slowly (and with its path bent by any difference in the speed of light to either side, and this maintains Euclidean geometry while providing the same precision in its predictions as GTR. That's why it's a valid tool for exploring these things - the two theories are essentially mathematical transformations of each other (which is why some people consider them to be different interpretations of the same theory), but they diverge in what they say about what goes on in black holes because LET doesn't have singularities. When you're trying to run the action in your head, and particularly when it becomes hard to simulate GTR's non-Euclidean geometry, it can help you picture that action if you know that it can still be done validly with Euclidean geometry: whatever happens there must match up to what things will look like with GTR. Wherever one theory says the event horizon must be, the other theory must agree with that, and the same applies to all the action outside of the event horizon. It's still hard though to picture what happens on the inside.

What you seem to have done is apply some results from special relativity only and not utilize whatever the LET version of a theory of gravity might be.

Up until the black holes start to interact, there is no need to consider gravity: we can compress their gravity wells as good as infinitely just by making the speeds of travel ever closer to c without quite reaching it. Once the two lines of black holes are almost level though, there will be severe "interactions" for the event horizons as the gravity wells are not compressed at all perpendicular to the direction of travel. If we consider all the material to be in singularities, those cannot be diverted to either side, so they should just keep going forwards unless they can be halted. (Things would be different in the full LET analysis as the material is not locked into singularities, so it could migrate to the sides. Completely different simulation software would be needed to explore that.)

The idea of a "pull" or a force being applied is a Newtonian version of gravity.   Gravity is not a force under General Relativity.

You are expected to interpret the word "pull" in that context in any way that suits the theory you want to apply. In LET it isn't a pull either, but there's no simple vocabulary available to express the idea without taking paragraphs to do so, and I won't go into the details here as this is not a discussion of rival theories.

The problem is, I think, that you (@ David Cooper ) previously referred to an arrangement of one long line of singularities as being one Black Hole.   You can't then blame Halc for assuming it was an ordinary Black Hole, i.e. an ordinary stationary solution of the EFE that is asymptotically flat.

The words used for it should not cause confusion: if you are simulating the action and see all these black holes line up in one single line with their event horizons connecting up, you then see one unified event horizon containing a long line of singularities. The term black hole becomes fuzzy in such a situation, just as it does during part of the time when two black holes are merging and have linked up without their singularities yet merged.

It's a definition not a rule.   It's also not "my" definition, the extract I quoted came from Wikipedia.  That particular definition is based on something Rindler developed in about 1950.

Definitions and rules are two sides of the same coin. If the rule doesn't match the definition, one of them is wrong. That connection between them can make them reasoning traps, and it's particularly important not to let definitions get in the way of exploring the physics. Both rule and definition can be wrong too, so when a rule is questioned, that questioning should not be shut down through the authority of a definition that goes with it. There are simulations in existence which explore black hole mergers, and if that software was turned to this, the result could provide unexpected results, which is why I'd like to get the idea to the people that have that software.

I get the impression that in your analysis (which you stated is based on LET),   the black holes are very much being considered as something like billiard balls moving through a fixed static space which seems to be described by the co-ordinate system in which the black holes are said to have a speed of approach.

They've been contracted down to extremely thin discs.
   

In General Relativity something different can happen.

Nothing different can happen, other than inside an event horizon.

The black holes aren't just billiard balls moving through a static space.   They are something which changes the nature of space around them.

In LET, the speed of light reduces, reaching zero at the event horizon - this leads to the exact same gravitational lensing occurring and identical visible action for the external observer.

As the two black holes approach each other they can be slowed down (or sped up) relative to each other because the metric of space between them was not describing flat space and futhermore  it wasn't even static - it has been changing with co-ordinate time while the black holes approached.

The entire gravity well can be compressed to a very thin disc too such that you only have these interactions at the very last moment as the two lines of black holes are close together - make the speeds of travel sufficiently high and that can mean no interaction until the last fraction of a second of the approach. Switch to using a different frame though and what you see there will create the exact same action, so if you choose the frame in which one line of black holes is at rest, you will then have them completely uncontracted with the other line of black holes more extremely contracted but approaching at nearly the speed of light. Again, the stationary black holes will not react to the approaching ones until the last moment, but the approaching ones will be in the gravity well of the stationary ones for a long time and will be affected by that. In GTR, that means extra space is packed in there for the singularities to travel through, so the external observer would certainly measure them as slowing down during the last moment of approach. If you could make that extra space infinite in length for the path of the singularities, you could effectively halt them, but it's hard to visualise exactly how this would play out as we're dealing with action inside an event horizon. Different simulations might produce different results and some might break, so this would be a good test of them.

So the co-ordinate separation between them isn't describing what it used to describe.  The velocity vector of an object does change as it travels through curved space so the black holes can have their velocities completely changed while they are approaching each other.

My bet is that the singularities will slow down in the last moments of approach with the event horizons connecting up, but will then speed up again and the event horizon will split up, restoring two lines of black holes. However, this is too hard to simulate in my mind at the moment and could well be wrong, so I certainly wouldn't bet any money on which way it will go. It will likely take simulations to settle it, and it may also be necessary to run the action repeatedly to test different separation distances between the black holes. So, the question is now out there. It may be some time before it can be settled.

[Bored chemist]

"Can a photon escape from inside the event horizon of two black holes?"
Given the conventional definition of "black"; no.

[Halc]

The two theories map to each other perfectly when it comes to predictions of the visible action from outside black holes

Lorentz Ether Theory was, to my knowledge, never generalized to a theory of gravity anytime in the 20th century.  I did find one first published in the 21st century, last revised in 2012: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0205035
It differs significantly from your assertions, primarily in the existence of black holes, which is an Einstein-only concept. They cannot exist in a preferred frame model since no coordinate system foliates all of spacetime.

but they diverge when describing the action inside them.

Only by denying said action at all. There is no 'in them' in any preferred frame model.

You see to be making up your physics. I invite to to cite sources for your claims, and not sources from science denial sites.

and this maintains Euclidean geometry while providing the same precision in its predictions as GTR.

This is the first assertion. If physical triangles (made of rigid rods say) have angles that don't add up to 180°, it is hard to argue for Euclidean geometry. From where does this claim come?

the two theories are essentially mathematical transformations of each other (which is why some people consider them to be different interpretations of the same theory)

LET is an alternate interpretation to only Special Relativity, never to GR. It never got gravity right, unless you count theories like the one I linked above, which probably should be called something like 'Schmelzer Ether Theory'. It does have singularities in what it calls 'frozen stars'. The mathematics at the event horizon (GR only term) is necessarily singular in this preferred frame.

I won't go into the details here as this is not a discussion of rival theories.

But you've done so in making these assertions. Topic has been moved accordingly.

The term black hole becomes fuzzy in such a situation, just as it does during part of the time when two black holes are merging and have linked up without their singularities yet merged.

The verb tense usage here suggests there's a meaningful coordinate time at which what you picture as a pair of physical singularities merge after crossing each other's event horizons. I never suggested any such thing.

In LET, the speed of light reduces, reaching zero at the event horizon

How can this object move at all through space? If the speed of light reaches zero there, the speed of matter would too, preventing a black hole from moving in coordinate space. It all seems self contradictory. I don't think Schmelzer makes this assertion/deduction either. Again, a citation would be nice here since I doubt any of it comes from Schmelzer.

[David Cooper (OP)]

It differs significantly from your assertions, primarily in the existence of black holes, which is an Einstein-only concept.

It doesn't. It merely gives them a different name to better reflect their nature, just as string theory calls them fuzzballs, but they're all referring to the same objects and the followers of these other theories still refer to them as black holes in most situation because that's what the people generally call them. This is equivalent to Christians in Indonesia referring to God as Allah in conversation with people of other religions where that word is the general word for God.

They cannot exist in a preferred frame model since no coordinate system foliates all of spacetime.

You've been told plenty of times before that in an expanding universe there's more than one kind of absolute frame: one which applies at a specific location which is at rest relative to the local space fabric and which cannot be the same one as for other parts of that fabric which are moving relative to the first; and an absolute absolute frame which may not match up to any absolute frame within the universe as every part of the space fabric could be moving relative to the absolute absolute frame. Ignoring these details leads to you making errors in your statements.

but they diverge when describing the action inside them.

Only by denying said action at all. There is no 'in them' in any preferred frame model.

You get more irrational by the year. There are objects which science has discovered and called black holes, and they have event horizons. There is an inside and an outside of an event horizon. Different theories which agree on the action on the outside of those event horizons can disagree about what happens inside them. String theory and LET agree on both. QM has a split personality at the moment with it half agreeing with those two while still clinging to GTR and messing itself up as a result, so it preserves information at the event horizon while failing to recognise that material and light stops there too.

You see to be making up your physics. I invite to to cite sources for your claims, and not sources from science denial sites.

You're the one making thing up here by misunderstanding things and misrepresenting my position. It is a matter of fact that the predictions of LET and GTR match up perfectly for all observations and experiments - there's already been a link in this thread to the wikipedia entry on LET which spells that out. It is not disputed by serious physicists, so what's your game? You just hate being pushed into corners where you lose, so you try to hide the evidence every time by tossing it all into the "new theories" bin - you're scared of anything that questions your broken pet models because you know deep down that they're wrong and yet you've tied yourself to them too strongly to be able to back down on them. That is the norm though in physics, and it's why it's failing miserably to self-correct, with the result that it's doomed itself to the most horrific ridicule when it all comes crashing down.

and this maintains Euclidean geometry while providing the same precision in its predictions as GTR.

This is the first assertion. If physical triangles (made of rigid rods say) have angles that don't add up to 180°, it is hard to argue for Euclidean geometry. From where does this claim come?

It comes from the fact (acknowledged on that wikipedia page) that the predictions match and that LET achieves this using Euclidean geometry with the speed of light slowing instead of trying to cram extra space into gravity wells while maintaining the speed of light at c. GTR is just a mathematical abstraction of LET, and it's one that breaks spectacularly when dealing with the contents of black holes, but it also breaks spectacularly outside them by generating event-meshing failures at every turn which have to be hidden in ALL simulations of GTR by smuggling in absolute time as part of a control mechanism to hide those errors. It's academic fraud, and some day the chickens will come home to roost. You're running out of time.

LET is an alternate interpretation to only Special Relativity, never to GR.

Let me repeat: LET accounts for gravity by having light slow down in gravity wells, and this enables it to match up as perfectly to observations and experiments as GTR, so you're simply wrong.

I won't go into the details here as this is not a discussion of rival theories.

But you've done so in making these assertions. Topic has been moved accordingly.

No; you moved it because you've been itching to move it right from the start, so you've been waiting for any thin excuse you can find (in this case a side discussion on the validity of different ways of analysing events where the view from one valid way of doing so reveals clear truths about what would happen as the two lines of black holes approach each other and where they are denied by someone who doesn't like the method, even though what it clearly reveals must match up to the predictions of their preferred method and which they would see if they were able to apply their method correctly to the same case using the same frame of reference - where they deny the action that their own preferred theory predicts and reject the other theory which makes the exact same predictions on the basis of their own error, a side-discussion of that becomes necessary and should not be used as an excuse to hide the thread). You overrode the purpose of this forum which is to discuss interesting science questions because of your own petty grudge, and you've done the same thing many times in the past with other threads because your underlying mission is to continue to defend academic fraud and prevent it from being exposed.

The term black hole becomes fuzzy in such a situation, just as it does during part of the time when two black holes are merging and have linked up without their singularities yet merged.

The verb tense usage here suggests there's a meaningful coordinate time at which what you picture as a pair of physical singularities merge after crossing each other's event horizons. I never suggested any such thing.

You said,

"There's no 'long black hole'. If you put the little ones close enough together, you get one black hole, and the event horizon of it is more or less spherical (assuming minimal total angular momentum). There's no such thing as a line of barely linked black holes. I spelled out why in my prior post, which perhaps you're not bothering to read. Tell me why my explanation is wrong if it is, but don't just keep repeating refuted stuff. I lay no claim to be necessarily right on this stuff."

So, that had to be corrected, and it just added to your drive to hide this thread in the subforum bin dominated by mathematically illiterate ramblings where hundreds more of your errors are stored. You have to move my threads to hide your errors just as much as to defend the establishment's broken models.

In LET, the speed of light reduces, reaching zero at the event horizon

How can this object move at all through space? If the speed of light reaches zero there, the speed of matter would too, preventing a black hole from moving in coordinate space. It all seems self contradictory.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the speed of light is slowed relative to the black hole - not relative to the space fabric. It's the same in string theory: matter/energy doesn't exist at a single point, but is spread out, so when we look at a particle and say, "it's there", we're only seeing the place it's centered on, but the particle is spread out through the entire visible universe. Its made out of waves which have a density distribution with most of the energy being where we see the particle, though the point at which the particle exists at any moment depends on probabilities tied to that distribution, making its location uncertain until we interact with it in some way. Those waves spreading through space serve as a medium which slows light relative to that medium. If a black hole is moving, the medium associated with it moves along with it. The medium also contracts when it moves, and if the black hole accelerates, the contraction has to adjust with that adjustment propagating at the speed of light: that's what gravitational waves are in LET. This medium also allows LET to account for frame dragging because when a massive body rotates, one side is moving one way and the other side is going the opposite way, so if you're close to one side of it you have more of this unseen medium moving past you one way than the opposite way, resulting in light taking longer to pass the body on one side than light moving in the same direction past the other side. This mechanism also applies to black holes which in LET (and string theory) are packed with stuff all the way through and lack singularities. That's another reason why LET is a superior theory to GTR because it accounts for more of the action.

Again, a citation would be nice here since I doubt any of it comes from Schmelzer.

This last bit about the medium is from string theory and I have not seen any reference to it in anything about LET, but it must be a standard part of LET because it's so damned obvious that light has to be slowed relative to the black hole and that there must be a medium causing that slowing which is additional to the space fabric. The bit about it accounting for frame dragging is my own discovery though and I don't know if I was the first to find it. I don't bother to publish my findings though because good science just goes into a black hole and is ignored by an establishment which merely wants to defend broken models, so I put it up online in various places and wait for future recognition when AGI trawls through everything and marks everyone's work. And now you'll use the last few paragraphs as another excuse for putting this thread in new theories, but you pushed for these paragraphs to be written so you've engineered that excuse yourself. It's only been necessary to discuss this because of you. You should not be a moderator because you deliberately sabotage discussions.

[Kryptid]

you try to hide the evidence

Do you really think that's what he's doing? This forum isn't hidden.

[Eternal Student]

Hi.

It is a matter of fact that the predictions of LET and GTR match up perfectly for all observations and experiments - there's already been a link in this thread to the wikipedia entry on LET which spells that out.

    I'll take responsibility for putting that reference in.     
    However, it doesn't state that  LET and GTR match up perfectly.    It only states ... it is not possible to distinguish between LET and SR by experiment...

Halc and I have asked for references a few times now, I think .....

You may need to provide some references or more details for this.

I invite to to cite sources for your claims, and not sources from science denial sites.

     This doesn't mean just telling people what you think LET is supposed to be about.   It means finding a textbook, research paper or article and providing the details of that.   Ideally, you'll even provide the relevant page numbers.   Then the reader can go and check the source information directly themselves.
 
   Sadly, this does take up your time but it's essential in any academic discussion.    I took the time to try and find out something about LET even though you hadn't provided any references.   I took the time to find the exact page numbers people might need in a book by Sean Carroll in post #29   etc.     Halc took the time to find a paper on the arxiv print server and provide us the reference for that and (it seems) spent a while trying to check for similar papers about a treatment of gravity in LET.

You should not be a moderator because you deliberately sabotage discussions.

    I'm not a moderator and I wouldn't want to be.   However, you've got to see that the moderators have some obligation to follow some rules and policies.
    The "new theories" section isn't the same thing as the "dustbin", it's just where any new theory is supposed to be discussed.   If Einstein had posted his first draft of STR then it probably would have started in the new theories section.   The main criteria for a discussion in the other sections is that it should be discussing what is considered to be the mainstream science of today.
    Your posts were using some vocabulary that has an established meaning   (e.g.   "event horizon" as discussed in post #29) but you were directly stating that you were setting your own definitions and rules and just using the same terms anyway.   That's OK but you can't then argue that you are discussing mainstream science.   What you are doing is likely to accidentally or deliberately mislead people by using common terms to describe different things.

Best Wishes.

[Bored chemist]

And now, some music.

[Halc]

Only by denying said action [within black holes] at all. There is no 'in them' in any preferred frame model.

You get more irrational by the year. There are objects which science has discovered and called black holes, and they have event horizons. There is an inside and an outside of an event horizon.

This is using Einstein's model, not a preferred frame model. To my knowledge, no preferred frame model has an event horizon at black holes since there  are no events on the other side to define one. I may be wrong about this, so kindly put in the citation. Your lack of citations reduces your posts to mere assertions. LET does not make the claims you ascribe to it.

You're the one making thing up here by misunderstanding things and misrepresenting my position.

Misunderstanding your position isn't 'making things up'. You asserted valid physics in Euclidean space. You asserted action (or even space at all) within black holes in a preferred frame model like LET. I need references for those claims, else you very much indeed are making up your physics. I'd not have moved the thread just for saying what LET theory posits, but you seem to simply be attaching the LET label to your personal ideas. That puts the topic here in new theories.

It is a matter of fact that the predictions of LET and GTR match up perfectly for all observations and experiments - there's already been a link in this thread to the wikipedia entry on LET which spells that out.

Wiki spells out something entirely different. It says LET in only an interpretation of special relativity and thus matches the predictions only of SR because it had never been generalized.

The non-existence [up until apparently 2012] of a generalization of the Lorentz ether to gravity was a major reason for the preference for the spacetime interpretation.

Wiki says an entire century went by without LET having a theory of gravity. The one in 2012 is not called LET as far as I know, and it does not back your claims as far as I know, but I invite your to prove me wrong.
In particular, when does say an infalling particle actually get inside a black hole? How long does it last there? These questions are meaningful in an interpretation with absolute time.

It is not disputed by serious physicists, so what's your game?

I'm disputing your personal claims, not disputing anything on which serious physicicts have commented.

and this maintains Euclidean geometry while providing the same precision in its predictions as GTR.

This is the first assertion. If physical triangles (made of rigid rods say) have angles that don't add up to 180°, it is hard to argue for Euclidean geometry. From where does this claim come?

It comes from the fact (acknowledged on that wikipedia page) that the predictions match and that LET achieves this using Euclidean geometry with the speed of light slowing instead of trying to cram extra space into gravity wells while maintaining the speed of light at c.

Wiki says nothing of the sort. I'm looking at the LET page ES linked. Kindly quote the text you think says this. The article I see says LET doesn't have a theory of gravity at all, per the line I quoted above. It says nowhere that LET is a mathematical abstraction of GTR.

LET is an alternate interpretation to only Special Relativity, never to GR.

Let me repeat: LET accounts for gravity by having light slow down in gravity wells, and this enables it to match up as perfectly to observations and experiments as GTR, so you're simply wrong.

Perhaps so, but citation needed. It certainly doesn't say that on the wiki page, which actually says that LET doesn't account for gravity at all.

You said,

There's no 'long black hole'. If you put the little ones close enough together, you get one black hole, and the event horizon of it is more or less spherical (assuming minimal total angular momentum). There's no such thing as a line of barely linked black holes. I spelled out why in my prior post, which perhaps you're not bothering to read. Tell me why my explanation is wrong if it is, but don't just keep repeating refuted stuff. I lay no claim to be necessarily right on this stuff.

So, that had to be corrected, and it just added to your drive to hide this thread in the subforum bin dominated by mathematically illiterate ramblings where hundreds more of your errors are stored. You have to move my threads to hide your errors just as much as to defend the establishment's broken models.

This fails to tell my why my explanation is wrong, and didn't even bother to quote the explanation itself. Your purposes seem to be evangelism and not actual science. A scientist would back his claims, and would demonstrate how erroneous explanations such as the one you didn't quote above are wrong. Instead I get raving assertions of conspiracy.

How can this object move at all through space? If the speed of light reaches zero there, the speed of matter would too, preventing a black hole from moving in coordinate space. It all seems self contradictory.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the speed of light is slowed relative to the black hole - not relative to the space fabric.

Sounds then like relativity. In an absolute interpretation, speed is relative to the absolute frame an not to any other. It's a property, not a relation. Schmelzer seems to have solved this issue, but seemingly not by the premises you're asserting. I admittedly don't know any of his premises. The premises of SR are not held of course, but the Einstein Equivalence Principle is derived (not postulated as in GTR), which is impressive.

[David Cooper (OP)]

you try to hide the evidence

Do you really think that's what he's doing? This forum isn't hidden.

It's a standard way of putting things where they will hardly ever be seen by anything other than bots, so yes.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Hi.

It is a matter of fact that the predictions of LET and GTR match up perfectly for all observations and experiments - there's already been a link in this thread to the wikipedia entry on LET which spells that out.

    I'll take responsibility for putting that reference in.     
    However, it doesn't state that  LET and GTR match up perfectly.    It only states ... it is not possible to distinguish between LET and SR by experiment...

You're right - I didn't look it up and just went by what I thought I remembered it saying, but it does restrict that to STR.

Halc and I have asked for references a few times now, I think .....

It isn't something that needs references, so you should not be demanding any. If your model doesn't conform to the requirements of STR, it will enable you to measure absolute speeds with ease, so GTR has to include STR as part of itself in order to fit observations. GTR also has to conform to our 3D Euclidean view of events while doing its 4D stuff, so the two things have to map to each other through transformations and must match in the 3D Euclidean view that they generate. LET describes what you get in that 3D Euclidean view, and it uses the exact same equations to describe how light slows down in a gravity well as GTR uses to describe how light doesn't slow down, but extra space is put in its path instead to slow it's passage through a gravity well. The two ways of looking at it necessarily map to each other and you don't need a reference to understand that. That is why you can be certain that what LET tells you you will see in the Euclidean view of the action will match up to what GTR tells you you will see in the Euclidean view. This should not be in dispute as it's such an obvious mathematical necessity when they are calculating that using the exact same maths. They don't even diverge inside black holes in that regard - they necessarily match each other at every turn.

That's why whenever I employ LET as a tool for viewing the action, it should not lead to a demand to justify it every time with the resulting discussion then being used as an excuse to throw the whole thread into new theories - the theory behind the tool is not what the thread's about, but Halc keeps using any mention of the tool that I use as a deliberate way of generating a way of throwing the thread into that bin. I use that tool because it fits the facts of what the universe does while providing a view of events that ordinary people can actually simulate in their head to follow the action, unlike the GTR 4D view which 99.9% of professional physicists can't simulate in their head. It is the far better tool for public understanding of science and it is useful as it reveals errors in the 4D simulations that people attempt in their head and get wrong.

When LET and STR tell you what these lines of black holes look like as they approach each other before the gravitational interaction becomes significant (due to the extreme contraction of the gravity wells - no amount of applying GTR can change that because the gravity acting on each line from the other is so weak up to that point and cannot affect the 3D Euclidean view of the action), GTR cannot disagree without diverging from what the universe is observed to do. STR only loses its ability to predict the action once the two lines of black holes are almost level with each other, so that's when you have to add GTR to predict what happens next, but you don't then throw out STR at that point as you have to continue to apply all the relevant contractions. When I simulate the action using my preferred tool of LET, I can see with ease that running the action up to this point provides no room for any significant interaction as these compressed gravity wells approach each other, but if you're trying to do the equivalent with GTR, your attempt to simulate what GTR does up to that point is much more likely to go wrong because the odds are that you aren't one of the few who can run that action correctly - the brain is not designed to visualise the 4D metric in the same way as it has evolved to see the 3D Euclidean view. I see the speed of light beginning to fall infinitesimally. You imagine the space beginning to warp, but you have huge errors in your visualisation of it.

You should not be a moderator because you deliberately sabotage discussions.

    I'm not a moderator and I wouldn't want to be.   However, you've got to see that the moderators have some obligation to follow some rules and policies.

When the exact same discussion has to be gone through as a pantomime due to Halc repeatedly pretending that we haven't already established the validity of the tool, you are actually seeing him using it as a wrecking mechanism to shut down discussions that he doesn't like. He does this every time

    The "new theories" section isn't the same thing as the "dustbin", it's just where any new theory is supposed to be discussed.   If Einstein had posted his first draft of STR then it probably would have started in the new theories section.   The main criteria for a discussion in the other sections is that it should be discussing what is considered to be the mainstream science of today.

This thread is about a question and it's theory-independent. My use of a tool to indicate that someone else is not applyint their chosen tool correctly is not the discussion. The discussion is an interesting idea that under all these theories there might be a way for a photon to escape from inside an event horizon, and that kind of question is one of general interest to people. It is nothing to do with new theories, but is about whether some possible actions may have been missed within GTR. My use of LET as a tool to show up a misuse of GTR does not turn it into something else.

Your posts were using some vocabulary that has an established meaning   (e.g.   "event horizon" as discussed in post #29) but you were directly stating that you were setting your own definitions and rules and just using the same terms anyway.   That's OK but you can't then argue that you are discussing mainstream science.   What you are doing is likely to accidentally or deliberately mislead people by using common terms to describe different things.

That is incorrect. I was using the terms the way they are normally used, but there are places where definitions can be unsound and misleading. In a case where two event horizons have linked up but there are two singularities which then move further apart such that the event horizons decouple again, you have a region of space that dips below the gravity well level at which event horizons exist, but then rises back above that level again. If that action is possible, then the definition of the event horizon that you are using for GTR is inherently wrong and would need to be corrected to match up to the change in the understanding of the science of that happening. Definitions of things within a theory can actively contradict some things that can actually happen in that theory if they haven't been constructed perfectly. Again what we have here is an attempt to derail legitimate discussion of science by playing games with words and definitions.

Let me give you a parallel for this. It used to be thought that a sailing boat couldn't travel downwind faster than the wind, so that could have been built into the definition of a sailing boat: a sailing boat is a boat powered by the wind hitting its sails and which cannot go downwind faster than the wind. Now, if someone comes along and says, "What if it zigzags downwind and there's very little drag against the water? It might be able to go downwind faster than the wind." Someone might then object by saying, "Nonsense: by definition a sailing boat cannot go downwind faster than the wind, so you cannot be talking about a sailing boat! You must call it something else" That's the direct equivalent of what you're doing here. When they discovered that sailing boats could indeed travel downwind faster than the wind, they kept calling them sailing boats and any part of anyone's definition stating that they couldn't go downwind faster than the wind was deleted from the definitions. It will be the same with event horizons if we find cases where things can escape them due to the local depth in the gravity well reducing due to the singularities moving further apart. So, your objection has been a language game and not a scientific objection.

[Kryptid]

It's a standard way of putting things where they will hardly ever be seen by anything other than bots, so yes.

Citation please. It takes just as many clicks to get to New Theories as it does to get to any other forum here.

[David Cooper (OP)]

This is using Einstein's model, not a preferred frame model. To my knowledge, no preferred frame model has an event horizon at black holes since there  are no events on the other side to define one. I may be wrong about this, so kindly put in the citation. Your lack of citations reduces your posts to mere assertions. LET does not make the claims you ascribe to it.

The event horizon is called the event horizon because it's the limit of detectable events. It can be called that regardless of which theory you're applying, and given that it's the most commonly understood name for it and there's no other commonly understood name for it at all, it's the name people use. I don't need to cite anything to call out your language games.

Misunderstanding your position isn't 'making things up'. You asserted valid physics in Euclidean space. You asserted action (or even space at all) within black holes in a preferred frame model like LET. I need references for those claims, else you very much indeed are making up your physics.

You don't need references for any of it. Everything GTR does visibly in this scenario maps to a 3D Euclidean metric with an identical result to the LET predictions because they apply the same maths to it.

I'd not have moved the thread just for saying what LET theory posits, but you seem to simply be attaching the LET label to your personal ideas. That puts the topic here in new theories.

I wasn't attaching LET to the discussion beyond using it as a tool to show that GTR cannot magically do anything different to the action that's measured in a 3D Euclidean metric.

Wiki says an entire century went by without LET having a theory of gravity. The one in 2012 is not called LET as far as I know, and it does not back your claims as far as I know, but I invite your to prove me wrong.

Guess what the LET in CLET stands for. Doug Marett's site dates back before that and deals with LET and how it covers the same ground as GTR. You ought to remember this page; http://www.conspiracyoflight.com/Conspiracy.html

In particular, when does say an infalling particle actually get inside a black hole? How long does it last there? These questions are meaningful in an interpretation with absolute time.

With LET it slows to a halt just outside the event horizon, as does light, and then because the energy density has gone up a little, the event horizon eventually migrates out past this frozen stuff.

It is not disputed by serious physicists, so what's your game?

I'm disputing your personal claims, not disputing anything on which serious physicicts have commented.

When "personal claims" are backed by mathematics (e.g. the necessity of both theories to generate the same 3D view of the action as they're applying the same maths, there is no cause to dispute them.

Wiki says nothing of the sort. I'm looking at the LET page ES linked. Kindly quote the text you think says this. The article I see says LET doesn't have a theory of gravity at all, per the line I quoted above. It says nowhere that LET is a mathematical abstraction of GTR.

I misremembered what it said having not looked at it for over a year or more. Again though, you shouldn't need to look anything up to be able to see that two theories applying the same maths will generate the same 3D view. GTR merely generates an additional 4D view which cannot lead to a different 3D view.

Let me repeat: LET accounts for gravity by having light slow down in gravity wells, and this enables it to match up as perfectly to observations and experiments as GTR, so you're simply wrong.

Perhaps so, but citation needed. It certainly doesn't say that on the wiki page, which actually says that LET doesn't account for gravity at all.

People who actually work on LET with this simple addition of having light slow down in gravity wells do call it LET. They just aren't easy to find and aren't known to the people who write that wikipedia page.

This fails to tell my why my explanation is wrong,

That had already been done, so there was no need to repeat it.

and didn't even bother to quote the explanation itself.

That was an exact quote of it.

Your purposes seem to be evangelism and not actual science.

The purpose of this thread was to draw attention to a case that may have been overlooked. There is no evangelism in it whatsoever, and every part of the tool I use is proper science.

A scientist would back his claims, and would demonstrate how erroneous explanations such as the one you didn't quote above are wrong. Instead I get raving assertions of conspiracy.

I do back them, and I did explain why your idea that a line of black holes doesn't suddenly have a single singularity in it the moment the event horizons connect. Those singularities cannot suddenly move faster than the speed of light to merge.

Sounds then like relativity. In an absolute interpretation, speed is relative to the absolute frame an not to any other.

The speed of light reduces in gravity wells relative to the mass that forms the gravity well, and at no point can it go faster than c relative to the space fabric. When we're dealing with light moving next to the event horizon, it's slowed to a crawl whether going outwards or inwards, but that crawl is a speed relative to the black hole and not relative to the space fabric.

Schmelzer seems to have solved this issue, but seemingly not by the premises you're asserting.

His solution for that would need to be the same if it fits observations.