betterthanwell comments on Justifiable Erroneous Scientific Pessimism - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 08:37PM

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Comment author: betterthanwell 10 May 2013 04:33:27AM 2 points [-]

"I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!" (Eddington, 1935)

Eddington erroneously dismissed M(white dwarf) > Mlimit ⇒ "a black hole" , but didn't he correctly anticipate new physics?
Do event horizons (Finkelstein, 1958) not prevent nature from behaving in "that absurd way", so far as we can ever observe?

Comment author: shminux 25 June 2013 10:52:19PM -1 points [-]

It's hard to know what Eddington meant by "absurd way". Presumably he meant that this hypothetical law would prevent matter from collapsing into nothing. Possibly if Chandrasekhar had figured out the strange properties of the event horizon back in 1935 and had emphasized that whatever weird stuff is happening beyond the final Chandrasekhar limit is hidden from view, Eddington would not have reacted as harshly. But that took another 20-30 years, even though the relevant calculations require at most 3rd year college math. Besides, Chandrasekhar's strength was in mathematics, not physics, and he could not compete with Eddington in physics intuition (which happened to be quite wrong in this particular case).