Maybe Black holes do not exist Posted Monday, April 04, 2005 4/04/2005 12:38:00 AM

"It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist. "
-George Chapline Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

According to this article appearing at nature.com at least one physicist at LLNL believes that what appear to be black holes are in fact dark-energy stars. Dark-energy, as you may know, is the theoretical substance used to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe (although it appears that some Italian and U.S. cosmologists don't believe dark-energy is needed). On the outside dark-energy stars would act exactly the way you would theorize a black hole would act but the inside will be quite different. According to the article, instead of being crushed at the singularity things bounce around inside.

This gets me thinking. How can we ever test what is beyond the event horizon of a black hole/dark-energy star. Once we send a probe in can we ever retrieve the data. If we were to send an observer beyond an event horizon will we never know his observations. According to some physicists (and now Stephen Hawking) information might be retrievable. That brings up my philosophical question of the day "If a scientist made a discovery beyond an event horizon and there was nobody there to review it, did it shift a paradigm?"