The fact that the M87 black hole looks like every artist's conception I've ever seen, leads me to be highly suspicious of the photo.

I must say, I severely admire your courage to question them like this.

Most physics research depends on political charity. The big problem is the distribution of funding by grants. There is also information hiding. For example, for a long time our government supressed research on quaternions, If someone did original research on quaternions for a masters thesis, the government made sure it did not get indexed. In their hubris, they were sure the Soviets couldn't figure out the trajectories for ICBMs if we didn't talk about quaternions in the literature. If you find one of these rare papers, the bibliography will likely have only Hamilton's original paper and a few more no later than 1950. They stopped this when our own people started dying due to guidance computer failures on interceptors that would maneuver through the pole of the local coordinate system, generate a divide by zero error and reboot. Intercept failed, people died. Eventually, they realized that the Soviets had figured things out a long time ago and we were just shooting ourselves in the foot. The equivalent of friendly fire.

I knew someone, college friend, who went into theoretical physics and knew Hawking. Said he was overhyped also.

The lure of celebrity seems too tempting to resist for many of these people and their agents. It seems also that almost all their fans have no idea what they're talking about.

Absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately there are even worse people out there: “science evangelists”.

I agree with absolutely every word of this, and I applaud you for producing it. I've only recently found your channel, and you seem to be on exactly the right track about most everyone else being on the wrong track.

Hawking and the others are among the popular physicists who did not get a single piece of original research right. Thanks for another great video.

Wow this was an eye opener for me (a non physicist but interested in popular physics books -those without a formula-) thanks herr doktor.

At latest since Obama's Nobel Prize you know that you have to question such prizes.

Thank you for expressing so clearly and concisely my same objections. I am glad to have somebody who can articulate them far better and more briefly than I.

I read a 'A Brief History of Time' 30 years ago as a teenager. Years before academic studies. To that time I had all my plans pointed at astrophysics. After having read that book I quit all my plans and change to biology, chemistry and environmental science in general. Sorry guys, there is no content in this book. I realized, it is peculiar field of science with no logic inside. It took me over 20 years to come back but I did it when such people Like Unzicker and many others show up in my life. There is one important rule in modern world. The more the topic is talked about the less valuable it is.

Hawking said Philosophy is dead, but he kept on philosophizing

It's called theoretical Physics, and it means that you can play with equations to see what the math tells you, exactly what you did in the Schwarzschield radius and mass dependence here. So yes it's still physics as long as you're consistent with the rules. Just say that you yourself didn't understand it, so it's not good for you.

Really enjoying the lectures. Savage but true, but in his defense, really nobody has contributed much of anything in the past 80 years compared to the founding physicists.

I'm just gonna say it: I have very, very serious doubts about his capacity to write the many of the books that he did. There was a long stretch of time where he could only communicate with blinking to generate a small number of words per hour. I think it's extremely likely that much of his later works, as well as many of the "speeches" he gave through his iconically robotic sounding speech generator were ghostwritten and that certain scientific minds were definitely using his celebrity and influence to push ideas in his name - with or without his consent. It's existentially horrifying to consider, but it's nevertheless something any rational person must. How would anyone know if he was? Would we even know if he objected to what was being said in his name? It's not as if he could protest in any way. Thus, it's entirely possible that he was a total prisoner in his own body, calling out for help as his handlers trotted him out again and again to push their agendas - what could he have done to stop anyone from doing so? If this was the case, then he was an abused celebrity, indeed. EDIT: I started typing this before I got to the end of the video - you're the first person who's discussed the issue that mamy of works were most likely ghostwritten. Well done - I obviously agree!

I am enjoying your series very much.

creepy - can you imagine being locked-in like Hawking and have someone abuse you routinely while being completely helpless to stop it. You couldnt even reach out to others without her carting you away or unplugging your voicebox

the sanctification of hawking was the result of the fact that SO LITTLE was/is happening in physics that is new, novel, or engaging....physics is an impoverished discipline and hawking was probably the last and most recent physicist in the past 75 years to actually have a genuinely new idea, namely the black hole

It's anthropocentric to immediately demand that a mathematical model be testable by us meat sacks at the present time. The ToE when it arises will most likely look impossibly highfalutin to the uninitiated. It will look like a string theory or some such. It's a nice ideal to have things be testable but we may just have to wait on some big developments to reach that point. To criticize a model like string theory for "having no basis in reality" is anthropocentric because we can only approach knowledge of absolute reality from the limited vantage of our corner of apprehension. Our minds, however, aren't always so tethered to immediate experience, which is how we get developments like relativity and QM in the first place. Do you think both of those models received the criticism that, "they have no basis in reality" when they came out? I'll bet they did. We may get to a point that "testing" a theory or model might take the form of running it as a simulation on a computer or quantum computer, and seeing if that model generates something resembling our observable universe.

Thank you. Really. These issues need more exposure, and I know they most often fall on deaf ears

Around 11:00 you talk about the theoretical assumptions on the photo of the Black Hole. Have you done a video on that? Or could you please mention me one on the issue?

WOW! He said the quiet part out loud; where everyone could hear it. Someone tell him “that’s not polite.“. I often wondered if Hawkins’’ peer group secretly resented the seemingly disproportionate press to accomplishment ratio Stephen Hawkins’ received. It’s actually refreshing to hear someone saying this out loud while still maintaining respect. Yes of course Hawkins was a genius who contributed to the body physics but he did so while suffering an incredibly debilitating & progressive disease. Therefore his celebrity is a function of what he overcame to make those contributions rather than the size of those contributions themselves.

I just discovered this channel and am loving it so far.

A Nobel prize does not validate a scientific theory ! This is an example of how a sociological phenomenon (society rewarding a scientist in a big way for some scientific effort) can skew a hard science away from the path of truth seeking.

"Physics deals with theories that are not really observable and testable." Bingo! That's a _huge_ critical problem. Yet we are sternly admonished that we _must_ accept them, or else be labeled as "against science." Thanks for saying this.

I think you are correct about your cynicism regarding the authorship of his latter books.

I feel sad, I don't know what to think.

I was fortunate to meet Hawking as a student and found him to be one of the most inspiring and gifted physicists of our times. He demonstrated a vivid genius under extremely difficult handicap. Let’s be inspired and step away from quick polarized judgement

What do you think of Arps theories of active galactic nuclei producing new matter and ejecting quasars? And the idea that black holes i.e. the galactic nuclei being counter-spacial sinks and the voltage potential of the galaxy in a Plasma(electric) Cosmology?

I'm really interested in the Schwarzschild radius 'density problem' talked about in this video, but I was not able to discern the argument being made. What exactly is the contradiction or the inconsistency which it reveals? Is this covered somewhere else? I like this channel so much because it goes against the grain, but the problem is when you go to Google to get more information, the search results are all from the mainstream perspective. So it's almost impossible to find helpful sources when this channel needs added explanation.

So the only non-overhyped physicist is Unzicker?

This video shows a complete misunderstanding of what a black hole is. A black hole isn't defined as a material object with a given density; rather, it is defined (loosely speaking) as a region whose radius is less than or equal to its Schwarzschild radius. In this regard, the Schwarzschild radius of the observable Universe is in fact smaller than its radius. So the claims about black holes made here aren't valid criticisms.

Thank you for saying it out loud...

Totally agree! Instead of creating new entities like strings and extra dimensions, use only established facts to form a hypothesis. This will at least lower the burden of proof.

Mr. Unziker, on the "huge extrapolations" subject regarding S. radius, who else thinks as you do?

Fascinating stuff...cheers.

Physics might teach just experiments, leaving the students to formulate their own theories.

The block universe, where all of time is equally real, is a great idea. If it's true it makes us immortal. But all the events of an eternal past exist outside the range of our own light cones so none of it's observable.

I loved the comment about R and M in the Schwartzchild equation. Once you think about it, it hits you that there's something seriously wrong with the equation! What's more, if the equation is logically derived from a theory, then the theory is seriously wrong!

I agree, for some reason people don't know that Einstein repeatedly said that singularities are not possible. In the 1939 journal "Annals of Mathematics" he wrote "the essential result of this investigation is a clear understanding as to why the Schwarzchild singularities (Schwarzchild was the first to raise the issue of General relativity predicting singularities) do not appear in physical reality. Although the theory given here treats only clusters whose particles move along circular paths it does seem to be subject to reasonable doubt that more general cases will have analogous results. The Schwarzchild singularities do not appear for the reason that matter cannot be concentrated arbitrarily. And this is due to the fact that otherwise the constituting particles would reach the velocity of light." This phenomenon is illustrated in a common relativity graph with velocity (from stationary to the speed of light) on the horizontal line and dilation (sometimes called gamma or y) on the vertical line. Mass that is dilated is smeared through spacetime relative to an outside observer. General relativity does not predict singularities when you factor in dilation. Nobody believed in singularities when Einstein was alive for this reason. Wherever you have an astronomical quantity of mass dilation will occur because high mass means high momentum. 99.8% of the mass in our solar system is in the sun 99.9% of the mass in an atom is in the nucleus. If these norms are true for galaxies than we can infer that there is 100's of trillions of solar masses at the center of common spiral galaxies. There is no way to know this through observation, there is far too much interference, dilation and gravitational lensing. If we attribute a radius to these numbers than we can calculate that relativistic velocities exist in these regions. The mass at the center of our own galaxy is dilated. In some sublime way that mass is all around us because as the graph shows we are still connected to it. Einstein formulated relativity before the existence of galaxies was confirmed. It's clear that the mass is dilated though the galaxy and not the universe as a whole. The greatest mystery in science is the abnormally high rotation rates of stars in spiral galaxies (the reason for the theory of dark matter). It was recently discovered that low mass galaxies (like NGC 1052-DF2) have normal star rotation rates. This is what relativity would predict because there is an insufficient quantity of mass at the center to achieve relativistic velocities. This is virtual proof that dilation is the governing phenomenon in galactic centers, there can be no other realistic explanation for this fact. If you pose the question "why can't we see light from the galactic center?" the modern answer would be because gravitational forces there are so strong that not even light can escape (even though the mass of the photon is 0) Einstein's answer would be because the mass there is dilated relative to an Earth bound observer. Einstein's answer explains the greatest mystery in science.

It's good to question science. An essential part of good science

Well done, great stuff!!!

Never read it (a brief history) but it appears I haven't missed much...cheers.

I remember when A Brief History of Time first came out. I was _very_ excited. Then I read it. Twice. I came out understanding _less_ than I went in with. A lot of swash and no buckle. The exact same thing happened to me with String Theory. Very excited we were getting to the bottom of things but then the bottom dropped out and we were left looking into an abyss. How do you feel about Roger Penrose? I argue he's up there with Dirac. Would love to see how people feel about that. Especially given his recent work on Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, Objective Reduction, and, with Stuart Hammeroff, Orchestrated Objective Reduction in cerebral pyramidal cell microtubules and their role in animal consciousness.

Dear Mr. Unzicker, I have a question if you do not mind about the hawking's radiation - how it happens that only the antiparticles are sucked into the black hole?

Should i mention Prof.Brian Cox?the smiley faced northern lightweight.

Your 20th century mathematical philosophical way was a old way when people were learning and grasping the modern concepts. It was a transitional phase which occurs when we learn something new. It is because of the new approach giving priority to the learning from Nature, the 20th century Physicists made huge progress.

So are black holes real or not? Or is the jury still out?

I’ve been watching your other long format videos as you suggested. I just watched this one and I very much enjoyed it.

Space-time in a black-hole would affect the speed of light, but may also change the nature of electro-magnetic radiation.

Gravity escapes black holes. Gravity waves travel at the speed of light. Gravity is space-time distortion. The mass of black-holes can be measured. So like neutron stars, black-holes must contain some form of matter. The concept of Matter more dense than neutrons offers an interesting form for speculation.

11:12 “there might be a relation between the gravitational constant and the speed of light and the mass and the radius of the universe” Both EM and gravity share the Inverse Square Laws, so this sounds logical as part of a 3D geometrical process! In observations on the international space station in near-zero gravity a candle flame naturally forms a sphere that is interacting with the environment relative to its two dimensional surface. Could this geometry be fundamental in forming three dimensional space and the passage of time? If the sphere was the size of the whole Universe the geometrical principle would remain the same, the surface area of the sphere is equal to the square c² of the radius of the sphere multiplied by 4π.

The publisher knows who wrote those books.

What i am really grateful for, what Stephen Hawking did. Was the disproval of the theory: "a Healthy mind lives in a Healthy body". I also frown upon those, who say things, that can/could be observed in Nature/Universe "break the laws of Physics". When in fact, they only break views or explanations, we came up with. Physics can't be broken. it can be discovered and/or (re)defined. Physics is the "explanation" of Nature/universal laws. Not the other way around. Just because it is Unusual on our Planet, Does not make it "break any laws". It might from time to time disprove a Formula. But "reasons for it" will remain. No matter what we scribe on a blackboard.

What a title! This should be interesting.

What singularity? where? (A singularity is generally an artifact of the math model.) Imagine a neutron star accumulating matter. The gravitational gradient (force) is maximal at its surface, and decreases to zero at its center. Since the amount of matter involved is finite, the force cannot be infinite. Similarly, while the pressure at the neutron star's center may be very large (perhaps causing a phase-change "quark-matter"), the amount of matter involved is finite, so the pressure cannot be infinite. While the gravity gradient at the surface will cause some very interesting optics, I can see no reason why that could produce a singularity, especially given that quantum mechanics indicates a minimum distance metric. As a photon rises it should be red-shifted until its wave-length matches the horizon's dimension, but that is also a finite value.

The Black Hole image was made in Photoshop 2019

Thank you for this. I totally agree with you on Mr. Hawking. I personally find the evidence for black holes pretty convincing but I adore your skepticism.

Hawking's result on black hole entropy was stunning at the time and still is. It started the serious and still continuing study of entanglement that seems to explain more and more things in modern physics. I would not dismiss Steven Hawking so lightly. Granted, his first book was not that good, but we can overlook this.

At last someone said it , I thought I was alone.

To be fair.. Einstein was no Maxwell, and Maxwell was no Gauss :)

If seeing is believing, SH fell miserably short with his discoveries.

I was heartbroken when Freeman Dyson died. But everytime I type Stephen Hawking, I have to take the help of the spellchecker.

My gripe with Hawking is in one sense similar, with this idea that he was an abused celebrity, as it was such a convenient narrative for the time to browbeat people with someone who would be untouchable from the usual level of criticism. And they used all this to insert and push a wrong philosophical/metaphysical picture of reality as if it was settled science, with entropy, big bang, heat death of universe, the usual glum disempowering stuff. But the original arrow of time book and his early work on proper cosmology and his debates and disagreements with Penrose make for thought provoking stuff. Just steer clear of the later books where he, or whoever was writing for him, starts spouting the most amateurish of philosophy that has been undermined in the philosophical conversation over a century ago.

I just found my favorite Phisicist, YOU. I mostly agree with all your critical observations. I'm still making my mind about Feynman, thou.

08:45 how can c^2 exist as a unit in the denominator of the schwarzschild radius ?

"The problem is that modern physics deals a lot with theories which are not really observable and testable. And also black holes fall into this category. You might say well there was a Nobel prize for black holes in 2020, right? Roger Penrose got the Nobel prize for the discovery that a black hole formation is a robust prediction of the General theory of Relativity. Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease." (Unzicker also quoting the Nobel Prize Committee), 'Overhyped Physicists: Stephen Hawking, the Abused Celebrity'.

May I suggest that singularities, being infinities, can never exist? It would suggest that the inside of a black hole is a superdense soup that is basically frozen in time, since the collapse is asymptotic and can never reach the singularity state (well, until infinite time passes, which is the same thing).

Yes, 10:30 the universe is a black hole. If it isn't, what is the escape velocity?

He's right: assuming black holes even exist all we can ever actually observe is the event horizon. Therefore the idea of a hidden singularity is a theoretical fiction which we cannot ever observe and does not therefore exist until we can: That is hard science! Reminds me so much of Godel's Theorem which physicists completely ignore.

I began to be a bit sceptical about Hawking when he started making pronouncements on subjects outside of physics. Fame seduces people - luckily I will never fall into that trap.

We can breath now

That torus has a lot of ice skaters carrying pens and paper.

Please make video on Feynman

Maybe you like to do a video or videos on today's more populist physicists and those making significant contributions today like, Leonard Susskind Michio Kaku Brian Greene Sean Carroll These guys seem to attract a lot of attention from the lay and non-lay persons. I am not a physicist but someone interested in the progress of Physics. Thanks for some of the videos enjoy most of them.

To paraphrase, black holes are not a theory; they are an observation. If we observe the phenomenon in the universe, they are not something we can altogether dismiss. Once we observe a phenomenon, we know it exists. In the case of the black hole, it is not entirely theoretical. A photograph proves its existence, although we are millions of light years away from its presence.

I find that if you do as Unzicker suggested and fill our solar system with water at a density of 997 kg/m3 and the solar system radius is 60 AU, then the Schwarzschild radius would be 30100 AU. This implies that you can pass the event horizon and still have 30040 AU to go until you hit the water volume surface of the solar system. Please check my calculation?

Great summary "modern physics deals. With alot of theories that are not observervable or testable" that is: not falsifiable. Is there a corollary for particle physics? Perhaps, CERN experimental results are only valid to the members of the church of particle physics, everyone else thinks they are graphs of random noise.

Hawking got a lot of mileage out of that wheelchair.

Dear Dr. Unzicker, one of the physicists about whom you have spoken very highly often in this channel, Dr. Pierre Marie Robitaille, explains very clearly in his channel why the anomalies such as those related to the Schwarschild Radius anomaly you discussed. On a superficial level, the answer is that the Schwarschild radius equation does not respect the extensive and intensive nature of thermodynamic properties. Also, another great out-of-the-mainstream scientist and mathematician, and someone who also features often in Dr. Robitaille's channel, Dr. Stephen Crothers has systematically proved that black holes are a flawed concept i.e. they cannot exist.

The problem is post war humanity shifted from trying new to perfection of existing. We have best social and electronic networks but all were invented way before in fifties we see new theories adopted by peer research rarely.

Have you noticed that Brian Greene frequently says he is skeptical of String "theory" (Why not call elastic strands "springs"?) but that he goes on to continually promote it? I don't know other people who promote things they are openly skeptical of except for actors and production teams who know they have made a terrible movie but they really need to recover their production costs.

"contributions to fundamental physics" that's hilarious, he was good at abstract mathematical speculation, one of those 'scientific' geniuses who believed they were so gifted that they were exempt from the need to experimentally verify anything. the guy was a science fiction writer

Agree with everything you said. Surely Laurence Krauss with his fake breakthrough (universe from nothing) is up there with the worst of them?

"If you take the very low density of the universe, like just one atom per cubic meter, and you take the size of the universe, turns out the universe is a black hole. How do we get there?" This explains number of dimensions, space curvature, modified gravity, space expansion, big bang, inflation, dark energy, etc. what's wrong?

yet the event horizon DOES decrease over time as black holes "dissipate" and jet out one pole and redistribute the matter absorbed into a galaxy and then as density lowers have a circulation to them.

Entropy does't occur now . . endless cycles ensue , of course there was a beginning & perhaps an end eventual , but these topics are outside of our pay scales . . certainly outside of clerk Einsteins

So, we need more science-and-engineering-based physics to establish new theoretical physics? I'm so confused. Right now I'm happy to toss out redshift as a measure of velocity/distance. I'm even happy to accept black holes can't exist. What I want to know is - what *can* we count on as actually being correct? I suspect I have a library of books which contain stuff that's not even wrong! :(

From everything I understand about the escape velocity of a so-called ‘black hole’ is either the ‘speed of light’ or ‘0’; so surely, by logic, that would imply either light CAN escape the speed of light, as that is the escape velocity, or ANYTHING can escape if ‘0’ is the escape velocity. Nothing about so-called ‘black holes’ makes sense, including their disregard for the 0th, 1st and 2bd laws of thermodynamics. Am I wrong?

Maybe black- holes don’t emit light because there isn’t light emitted by the mass contained within.

ausgezeichnet - bravo!

Physics will be taken over by physics perceptrons. I abandoned chess when Big Blue won against then world champion Kasparov. When physics perceptrons start producing physics, physicists will abandon it and go to greener pastures. Knowledge based systems, Bayesian analysis, theorem provers, neural networks, epistemic risk calculations, ML, expert systems, domain languages, etc. Physicists will become SME for these AI systems.

Interesting to note that this picture of Hawking on the title card, which was taken in 1982, looks nothing like the Stephen Hawking after 1982. They are OBVIOUSLY two different persons. Anyone can see the difference. Why is this the case? Why are there two different people claiming to be Stephen Hawking?

Who would know what Steven Hawking's views were....?

10:18 Incredibly the first time I saw this calculation of the density of the Universe be or conversely calculation the Swarzschild radius of a an object of the mass of the Universe being of the radius of the Universe was not on a Physics book: it was on an Isaac Asimov science popularization book far before I studied Physics.

Please share your thoughts on cosmic inflation. This also seems to be more of pop-science.

That final clause ("in which all known laws of nature cease") in the Nobel citation for Penrose is very much unfortunate. Penrose certainly should have edited that out.

Particle physics experimental results from CERN are a lot manipulated with models

What’s wrong with larger black holes being less dense? It’s easy to see why this should be true. The more mass a thing has, the less dense it needs to be to have a particular strength of gravity. Hence Jupiter has over 2.5x the gravity of Earth while having less than a quarter of the density. And what’s wrong with the idea that the universe itself might be a black hole (or inside of one)? That would be fascinating and would lend support to Lee Smolin’s hypothesis of cosmic natural selection. What’s this about a swimming pool the size of the solar system being a black hole? What does that mean and where are you getting it from?