The theory of black holes is one of these subjects which ought to be flagged as disputed, and yet science popularizers continue to portray it as settled. Einstein himself didn't believe in them - his entire concept of the space-time continuum was that it was a smooth field, which obviously can't contain singularities. Since Einstein was the one who created the General Relativity field equations and designed them precisely to his personal specifications, one might think that his intention in selecting those equations might count for something. Twenty years ago, in 2005, I was shocked when I attended a lecture by Kiwi black hole legend Roy Kerr to hear him argue that Stephen Hawking was wrong and that the theory of Hawking Radiation was grounded on false premises (his argument sounded plausible to me). Two years ago, in 2023, Kerr wrote an even more incendiary paper in which he argues (agreeing with Einstein) that singularities don't exist (https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang ... -roy-kerr/)
Now here's another black hole heretic I hadn't heard of before: George Frederick Chapline, Jr (born 1942, 83 this year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chapline_Jr.). He's interesting to me because, per Wikipedia, "He was awarded the E. O. Lawrence Award in 1982 by the United States Department of Energy for leading the team that first demonstrated a working X-ray laser." That puts him right in the core of Edward Teller's "Star Wars" team.
Teller remains interesting to me because of Stan Deyo's 1978 claim that he had something to do with gravity. Deyo may have got that idea from the Aviation Studies Electrogravitics Systems report of 1955 where the author (I think Ed Hull?) wrote that "Convair has taken the initiative with its recently established panel of advisers on nuclear projects, which include Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California". A running theme of that report is that gravity in the 1950s was seen as a nuclear problem linked to the strong force (which makes sense because the mass of atoms is concentrated in the nucleus). So to what degree Teller was actually interested in gravity is a question: one public-facing form which that interest took in those around Teller, however, is John Wheeler's career shift from thermonuclear fusion to gravity.
Chapline's claim that "black holes do not exist" appears to go back 21 years, to 2004: https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0503200
I'd like to read more about this, but the outline argument makes sense to me. I wonder how long Chapline had these heretical thoughts which challenged Wheeler and the post-1960s priests of General Relativity , and how many others around Teller also may have had them.The picture of gravitational collapse provided by classical general relativity cannot be physically correct because it conflicts with ordinary quantum mechanics. For example, an event horizon makes it impossible to everywhere synchronize atomic clocks. As an alternative it has been proposed that the vacuum state has off-diagonal order, and that space-time undergoes a continuous phase transition near to where general relativity predicts there should be an event horizon. For example, it is expected that gravitational collapse of objects with masses greater than a few solar masses should lead to the formation of a compact object whose surface corresponds to a quantum critical surface for space-time, and whose interior differs from ordinary space-time only in having a much larger vacuum energy [1]. I call such an object a “dark energy star“.
Regards, Nate