Einstein and his peers were resistant to black holes

Einstein’s resistance and whether it was “irrational”

• Several argue his skepticism about black holes was reasonable given lack of observations and discomfort with infinities.
• Others note he at times responded with personal dismissals, which some see as irrational bias rather than pure reasoning.
• General theme: rejecting a radical prediction of one’s own theory purely on intuition is questioned, but understandable in historical context.

Singularities: real physics or model breakdown?

• Many commenters treat GR singularities as signs the theory breaks down, not literal infinite-density points.
• Expectation: a future quantum gravity theory will regularize singularities.
• Some point out that other continuous theories (e.g., fluid equations) also develop singularities that are artifacts.
• A minority defends physical singularities more literally, but this view is portrayed as rare or misinformed in serious GR.

Time, observers, and event horizons

• Strong disagreement over “time stopping” at the horizon.
  • One side: to a distant observer infall appears to freeze; so maybe singularities never actually form from our frame.
  • Counter: this is a coordinate illusion; locally, crossing the horizon is uneventful and collapse to a singularity (in classical GR) is unavoidable.
• Some emphasize the distinction between event horizons (global, need full spacetime) and apparent horizons (what we can infer now).

Interior structure and alternative pictures

• Ideas discussed: growing interior spacetime that avoids a final singularity; exotic “Bardeen-like” cores with non‑ordinary equations of state; ultra‑compact stars; or no true horizons at all.
• Multiple speculative cosmologies:
  • Our universe as the interior of a black hole spawned in a larger universe.
  • Black holes as entropy “recycling machines” or sources of new big bangs.
  • Hierarchies of universes inside black holes debated as interesting but highly speculative.

Evidence for black holes and data skepticism

• Observational support cited: gravitational waves, dynamics at galactic centers, and EHT “shadow” measurements.
• Others remain cautious: EHT images involve complex reconstruction (including some ML); they prefer to treat black holes as still partly theoretical.
• Distinction stressed between “objects that look exactly like GR black holes from the outside” (strong evidence) vs certainty about interiors (unknown).

Rationality, bias, and language

• Debate over what counts as “rational” vs “irrational”:
  • Some define irrational beliefs as those not originally arrived at via explicit reasoning.
  • Others note this becomes circular and often just labels positions one disagrees with.