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Scientific blackwash
The jury is still out there on whether blackholes exist. Some insist the greedy entities exist. Others are now equally sure they are a figment of imagination. Einstein didnt believe in blackholes. Hawking does. The jury is still out there on the existence of blackholes. But more evidence is piling up on the against side. An Indian scientist claims to have predicted eight years ago what is now being inferred from experimental data. But no one is listening. Is this a case of blackwash in the scientific fraternity? When first discovered blackholes generated a lot of heat amongst astrophysicists. They were the ultimate proof of Einsteins theory of relativity. According to the theory, a collapsing star with a certain mass would collapse under its own gravity into a point of singularity which is so dense and hence so gravitationally strong that even light cannot escape its clutches. Relativity changed gravitation from a force acting at a distance to one caused by the warping of the space-time fabric. The problem has been again that of bringing together two conflicting theories, that of gravitation and that of quantum mechanics. The former does not believe in an absolute time while the latter rests on the concept of universal time. This gave rise to a problem - what happens on the edge of the black hole, called the event horizon. The view depends on which window you choose to look through, relativity or quantum mechanics. The former sees nothing happening whereas the latter predicts strange things based on a quantum transition of space-time. Abhas Mitra claims that he had disproved the existence of the blackhole by showing that the event horizon does not exist. And that the objects are MECO (Magnetospheric Eternally Collapsing Object). Experimental observations on a quasar recently pointed to the same MECO but Mitra has been kept out of the reckoning but for an acknowledgement for the naming. There are so many inconsistencies around a blackhole. Even as Stephen Hawking gave a theory that explained the radiation from a black hole, it threw up a question of preservation of information. Two years ago Hawking suggested celestial traps to circumvent this problem and keep the information intact! Some scientists believe the blackholes are dark energy stars that push out the radiation by repulsion. These are initial

stages in the vanquishing of blackholes which have captured popular and scientific attention for some time. Meanwhile, the battle for the celestial blackholes is poised for more earthly exchanges.

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