“There Are No Black Holes” – The Hazards of Selective Seeing and Doing

Bruce RinkerwhiteDid your parents ever scold you when you were a child for “hearing only what you want to hear?” Did they reprimand you over and over again for a disheveled bedroom – piles of dirty clothes, an ever-burgeoning population of dust bunnies, perhaps an escaped beetle or toad or snake somewhere in the mess?

Well, maybe that last item was one of my issues as a budding naturalist; but we’re all aware of our selective auditory and visual capacities: hearing and seeing only what we want to hear and see. Unfortunately, such selectivity often follows us into maturity.

It’s probably a kind of survival mechanism carried over from our days on the African savanna when selectivity focused on predators or competitors and, at once, ignored innocuous biota out there on the plains of evolution.

For modernity, however, that kind of selectivity doesn’t always work well in a pluralist society, especially among politicians, educators, medical doctors, and other professionals who deal with a diverse public. Who wants a physician to ignore a patient’s complaints about chest pain and shortness of breath and instead prescribe medication for carbuncles? Similarly, who wants a science educator working with our children who doesn’t know anything about atoms, apes, and astronomy and “teaches” instead about angels, arch-demons, and astrology as if such things exist?

Rightly so, we expect these professionals to see and hear and do well for us as the credos and standards of their chosen disciplines demand.

Recently, Stephen Hawking – widely-admired English cosmologist and author – submitted a short scientific paper in which he wrote the following sentence: “The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity.”( You can read Hawking’s paper in its four-page entirety at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.5761v1.pdf.)Further, he added: “This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.”

Pretty technical jargon, to be sure. But this brilliant scientist was simply attempting to refine the current debate about one of the universe’s strangest and least understood phenomena.

Note the phrases, “… there are no black holes” and “black holes should be redefined.” Apparently, the former phrase out of context was enough to stir up some injudicious passion among bloggers to the point that one satirically  attributed the following statement to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Science Committee: “Members of the House Science Committee will do our best to avoid listening to scientists.” This so-called quote by Rep. Smith, along with a similar alleged comment from Rep. Michelle Bachmann, ignited an on-line firestorm: both were fake comments used as satire by Andy Borowitz for The New Yorker magazine.

However, these claims, divorced entirely from any links to Representatives Smith and Bachmann, do encapsulate a worrying trend among policymakers: an intolerance of science’s methods, a misunderstanding of its terminology, and a dismissal of its applications for society at-large. Sadly, the latter phrase about redefining black holes was completely overlooked to explain Hawking’s intentions for his paper.

Sometimes policymakers and the general public consider science as if it’s a dogmatic institution populated with absolute certainties, unbending laws, and inviolable principles. It’s not. Science is more like a verb than a noun, a progressive but necessarily agnostic approach that searches out natural causes for natural phenomena. It’s a process, a way of knowing. The realm of the supernatural sits outside the domain of science and inside the boundaries of religion. Non-overlapping magisteria, as the late Stephen Jay Gould called them.

Science is infused with redefinitions and readjustments, tweakings and tinkerings. Every other field of study – e.g., medicine, economics, law, ethics, and history – advances similarly. Would any heart patient refuse treatment because we’ve advanced our understanding about heart transplants? So why should folks be alarmed to learn that new discoveries in science require us to hone our view of the universe?

Too often policymakers, and their conservative constituents, see and hear what they wish to see and hear, a fickle “grocery store” approach to science to pick their conveniences (e.g., mobile telephones and computers) but disavow their inconveniences (e.g., issues related to climate change and evolution).

Yes, black holes exist, but not as we imagine them – and perhaps not as we can imagine them. Such are the limitations of the human animal. Such are the dimensions of a near-infinite cosmos. As J.B.S. Haldane, famous British evolutionary biologist, once wrote: “Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

H. Bruce Rinker, Ph.D.
Ecologist, Educator, and Explorer

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