Talk:Magnetospheric eternally collapsing object/Archive 2

Always vs Never
The main point of issue here seems to be that proponents of standard GR assert that an event horizon will ALWAYS form in any spherically symmetric gravitational collapse, while MECO proponents say the event horizon will NEVER form because the infall does not reach it. TR commented above "The problem with the MECO works is that they claim the BH formation is impossible within the framework of GR+Electromagnetism." So be it. If that is the main point of issue; it is something we can work through and hammer out a compromise.

My stand from early in my education until today has been to regard all statements framed in absolute terms like those suspiciously, and to assume that there is a caveat or prerequisite condition needed for that absolute statement to be true. So for me; taking the view that event horizons always form or never form has not been an option, and I have continued to think that nature is full of surprises that will force scientists to reverse their opinions on important beliefs - where the only real question is which cherished assumptions must change, not whether widely-held opinions must be reversed (and that was my 2012 FQXi essay topic).

As for MECOs and Black Holes; my guess is that the universe is big and wild enough to harbor both (along with Planck stars, quark stars, gravatars, and other exotic types), rather than containing only one species or the other exclusively. JonathanD (talk) 20:47, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Too much like an attack
With the addition of the words fundamentally flawed, and the repeat of the questionable reference (Baez, Hillman) by Tim, this article appears to be anything but neutral. It sounds instead like Tim regards this article as a platform for his personal campaign to discredit Mitra and MECOs. While both Parejkoj (talk) and TR have made allegations of my OR and Synth, which I find hard to fathom, I see this inclusion as a rather clear cut example of Tim's POV being expressed via his own OR and Synth.

Similarly; Tim accused me of using a straw man argument, to defend my point, and then proceeded to use his own straw man argument on his talk page, to give the impression of raising a legitimate objection. Wikipedia does not allow articles to be used to push a personal agenda - on Tim's part in this case - which appears to be to discredit or trivialize this work. My impression is that it is the duty of all Wikipedia editors to be impartial, which is what I have attempted to do, and that articles should project a neutral view of the ideas presented.

Since the most recent edits leave this article sounding like a personal attack against living researchers, I feel obligated to step in to set things right. Since the Baez-Hillman citation is not from any reputable publication, and since the inflammatory remarks of Hillman would never be published in that form, I will probably start by striking that reference (in both places), and then re-write the opening paragraph so it is again neutral, while trying to make it more informative. JonathanD (talk) 21:48, 25 November 2014 (UTC)


 * The ongoing hassles over this article have been flagged up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics. In my experience the only way to defuse this kind of eternal disputation is to assume good faith (WP:GOODFAITH) on all sides, respect conventions on courtesy (WP:COURTESY) and above all focus on presenting the case that we find in reliable sources (WP:RS). We all believe that we have good grounds for our personal PoV, but here on this encyclopedia we need to make sure that those grounds are demonstrably encyclopedic: the watchword is Verifiability not Truth (WP:VERIFIABILITY). If a contentious claim cannot be verified, and its notability (WP:NOTABILITY) also verified, then it is better to omit it from the article unless and until a suitable source can be referenced.
 * I have to agree with the point about Baez and Hillman. A Google group is not peer-edited in any way and cannot be taken as a reliable source for such a fundamental allegation. If this theory is to be dissed, it will need better sources than that. That's not to say that I accept it as fact, far from it. The sources appear to present the main topic as a scientific hypothesis and we should do the same. We should not make value judgements unless they are both reliably sourced and their notability is also reliably sourced.
 * Accordingly, I shall edit down the lead a little, and see what else I think might need doing. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 13:13, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Done, superficially at least. I also checked the history and I agree with the editor who deleted the section on the general astronomic discussion: most if not all is not sufficiently relevant to the subject of this article. If there is an RS explaining how a certain body of work supports the MECO hypothesis, then fine cite that conclusion, but that is all. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 13:29, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I have reintroduced a statement identifying that Mitra's work is based on a misunderstanding of relativity using a peer-reviewed source. The source is a lot less explicit as to what mistakes Mitra is making then the Baez/Hillman post. An essential problem here is the quality of Mitra's work is so low, that it has not even led to any response from the mainstream scientific community. (There is a reason why none of his work, has appeared in any of the primary specialist journals of the field (e.g. PRD, CQG or GRG)) Hence, it is hard to find detailed rebuttals of his work in peer-reviewed sources.TR 14:52, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you for that. I have edited its placement to give a more structured presentation. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:24, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I would normally agree that newsgroup posts would not normally be counted as reliable sources. However there are exceptions, and I believe that this is one of them for several reasons:
 * The cited post is by a widely respected physicist, John Baez. (See the last paragraph of WP:USERG.)
 * It is easy to confirm that Baez has for a long time been a moderator of the newsgroup in question, hence it is impossible that somebody posing as Baez made the post.
 * In the post, Baez is commenting on why he has rejected multiple articles from Mitra. That is, the post explains why Mitra's work does not appear in the mainstream journals on the subject.
 * In short, the post has a similar character to a direct quote from Baez in e.g. a magazine interview (which certainly would count as a reliable source.) Also, it is as close as we will ever get to rebuttal from the scientific mainstream.TR 09:24, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * WP:SELFPUBLISH is crystal clear about that: "Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about living people, even if the author is an expert, well-known professional researcher, or writer." You cannot use it as a third-party source about Mitra. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:54, 27 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It would not but used as "a third party source about Mitra". This is about a research idea, not a person. So, no that clause of WP:SELFPUBLISH does not apply.TR 20:54, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It is dissing Mitra's work generally, not just on this point. That makes it personal. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 23:28, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
 * That still does not make it about the person Mitra (which is what the guideline you quoted is about), the newsgroup post is about the science.TR 23:49, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
 * To diss Mitra's professional work is to diss Mitra, don't be so silly. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 00:30, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm glad this is being discussed rationally. Yes, Hillman makes it too personal and it is unprofessional (which may have hurt Chris's career).  I like John Baez a lot, and in our interactions he has always been very nice to me.  I also applaud his many contributions to Math and the popularization thereof, and I think he is a wonderful human being.  Chris Hillman is another matter, and his critique is full of accurate information about GR but is slightly off-base as a criticism of Mitra.  I thank TR for bringing to my closer attention straw man arguments, which Hillman employs in one or two places (notably when mentioning the Painleve chart).  My view is that both Hillman and Baez have only superficially examined the phenomenology that Mitra proposes, so their criticisms only apply to Mitra's usage of Math within the well-proven framework of GR, and do not address the applicability of the Maths used by Mitra within the context of his own phenomenological assumptions.  It appears that people are not grasping that Mitra is not saying GR alone halts collapse, but rather that GR plus Electrodynamics does, and that MECO proponents say that Magnetism pushes the inner rim in a collapse scenario farther away from the EH (or where one would form).  JonathanD (talk) 17:37, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
 * There is an interesting blog post here: https://eternalblogs.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/the-genesis-of-magnetospheric-eternally-collapsing-object/ in which Mitra emphasises the importance of giving weight to peer-reviewed publications over uncontrolled Internet sources, and alleging that Wikipedia is not currently managing the issue in this article a well as it might. I will try and take a closer look at things, to see whether that complaint is justified. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 18:44, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Steelpillow: remember that this whole topic is very much WP:FRINGE. Mitra's work has been completely ignored outside his collaborators; a look at the citations of his papers is proof of this. Considering the lack of coverage or citations of this topic outside Mitra et al., Wikipedia may well be over-covering this topic. - Parejkoj (talk) 19:00, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Steelpillow: remember that this whole topic is very much WP:FRINGE. Mitra's work has been completely ignored outside his collaborators; a look at the citations of his papers is proof of this. Considering the lack of coverage or citations of this topic outside Mitra et al., Wikipedia may well be over-covering this topic. - Parejkoj (talk) 19:00, 2 December 2014 (UTC)


 * That may well prove to be the case, however I do feel that Mitra's allegation needs independent checking. For example I have just noticed (and removed) a second citation of that personal blog/discussion attacking Mitra. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 20:18, 2 December 2014 (UTC)


 * In my personal experience; a claim that Mitra's work 'has been completely ignored outside his collaborators' is an overstatement of the facts. I was asked to referee at least two papers in which Mitra was cited, and I know of two or three colleagues who were not collaborators with Mitra, nor with Robertson and Schild - and cited that work.  In one case, a paper by a Gravity Wave researcher stated that the lack of HFGW bursts could signal that BHCs are something other than black holes, and I said it was OK to cite Mitra as long as it was stated his ideas are unconventional.  I don't know how many referring papers not by MECO collaborators were published, if citations appear in well-regarded journals, or whatever.  I do know that, in some cases arXiv moderators and certain publishers have asked that specific citations by academic authors be removed, in order to allow publication to proceed - however I have no specific evidence that such a chilling effect is at work in this case.  JonathanD (talk) 04:25, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * You're going to have to provide references for your claim that his work has not been ignored, because looking at some citation records in ADS shows no one other than Mitra's collaborators citing his work. ADS records are the standard for checking citation history in astronomy. - Parejkoj (talk) 06:12, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

I added a sentence about recent observational evidence, and re-instated appropriate citations, where it appeared appropriate to insert that. JonathanD (talk) 05:22, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Neither Zamaninasab et al. nor Eatough et al. cite Mitra, so how can they be considered as evidence for his case in a wikipedia article? Claiming such is classic WP:OR and WP:SYN. - Parejkoj (talk) 06:12, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Specifically; it follows directly from the comment about the claimed discovery of magnetic field in a galactic nucleus by Schild. I fail to see how it fails to be called for directly by its relevance, or why the cited authors would need to cite Mitra specifically at all.  The statement that there is a magnetic field is confirmed, and so there is no liberty taken.  If there was no statement about the current research on the subject, the Wiki article would be guilty of putting forward the view there has been no confirmation since 2006, which IS indeed OR, and is not factual.  Are you suggesting Parejkoj (talk) that it is more factual to sweep available and readily evidence under the carpet?  JonathanD (talk) 06:45, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry; I meant only that the reference was to the claimed findings of Schild, et al. back in '06, and that it seemed too obvious to be irrelevant or gratuitous to include it. I thought I understood the policy regarding OR and SYN, but I still wonder how a neutral point of view on this topic can be engineered without including certain details such as these observations now on the table.  JonathanD (talk) 06:56, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I removed this section with its citations because it was not directly linked to MECOs. The findings concerned merely establish that black holes are not as cut-and-dried as some of us thought: they can have stronger magnetic fields and their event horizons might be something different. All this weakens the argument that MECOs are wrong because they conflict with proofs that some older black hole model is cut-and-dried. But it does not support MECOs per se and to suggest that it does is indeed OR/SYNTH. I suspect that this also answers Mitra's public complaint that reliable refs were deleted when the unreliable ones were substituted: yes they were reliable refs in themselves, but they were not relevant to this article. Otherwise, it may be that I have not looked hard enough into the article history to find the alleged lost refs, if this is the case then perhaps someone who remembers might be able to offer a pointer to them? &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 14:21, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Crawford and Tereno
I find it interesting that the "wrong and widespread view" they find Mitra guilty of falling for is the view expressed by Zel'dovich and Novikov, Frolov and Novikov, and Shapiro and Teukolsky, in their well-known textbooks. The 'Black Hole Physics' book by Frolov and Novikov is one book I learned from and particularly liked, but I never thought it was anything but rigorous. They seem to recognize we are talking about idealized models and emphasize that the Math must match the phenomenology too. I especially like their section describing how an eternal black hole in empty space requires an eternal white hole on the other end - which seems to equate with what some modern QG researchers are saying. But Crawford and Tereno apparently know their stuff.

I have been doing a general review of textbook treatments of standard black holes, and there is a fair amount of variation as to what various authors consider proved, or when the literature began to reflect the view of certain notions as factual (like event horizons). Hawking and Ellis already in 1973 bespoke absolute certainty with a chapter heading of "Exact Solutions" but my instructors emphasized that this meant only that the Math is exact, and it does not necessarily imply that the Physics is a precise replica of the mathematical ideal. While I have considerable love for the idea that pure Maths engender Physics, most of my instructors stressed the opposite view that Maths are useful only insofar as they model a physical system well. So we still need to examine how natural systems actually behave. JonathanD (talk) 06:34, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * For your benefit a clear separation of what is proved and what isn't:
 * It has been rigorously proven that General Relativity (GR) (+ standard physics) predicts the formation of black holes from generic initial conditions.
 * It is currently a hypothesis that GR describes gravity in the real universe.
 * This a hypothesis is well tested at moderate/long length scales (solar system dynamics, gravitational lensing, etc.)
 * In the "strong field" regime there have been only limited tests of GR. (Binary pulsars + limited evidence of the absence of a material surface some BHCs.)
 * So, either BHCs are black holes, or GR is wrong. The problem with the MECO works is that they claim the BH formation is impossible within the framework of GR+Electromagnetism.TR 11:08, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree with this breakdown, up to a point, but your conclusions are at odds with how I was taught the subject. The formation of black holes is indeed one of the 'remarkable predictions' of GR as stated right in the intro of Hawking and Ellis's '73 textbook.  And if one accepts that exact Maths equal a precise description of the Physics (that the map IS the territory) your point is sound.  Smoking gun evidence of event horizon formation still remains absent, as far as I know.  But in the same intro, there is a caveat that GR describes things only in the range down to about 10^-13 cm, beyond which is what you refer to as the strong field realm.  The Eöt-Wash group has done remarkable work to prove the equivalence principle down to small dimensions, so this largely validates your second point.  But your point "either BHCs are black holes, or GR is wrong" is NOT exactly correct.  If you changed it to say some or many BHCs must be black holes, according to GR, I'd probably agree completely, but you are saying there are no other animals in the zoo.  JonathanD (talk) 16:06, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Are there sufficient independent sources?
I am starting to worry that there are insufficient independent sources to support this article. Of the current (as of writing) references in article: Given the number of references to some of cited MECO papers, I originally thought that this subject would (marginally) satisfy the WP:GNG. Now, I am not so sure. Looking for reference to cite to produce independent views of the subject, I went to a large number of the citations to the MECO papers. It turns out these are mostly from the MECO proponents, or make no direct (or only passing) mention of MECOs.
 * 1, 2, 4, and 9 are by the primary proponents of MECOs (and therefore can not count as independent secondary sources).
 * 3 makes no direct mention of MECOs (just references one of Mitra's (M)ECO papers as based on a misconception.
 * 5, 6, and 7 are unrelated to MECOs (see above).

Without multiple secondary independent sources providing significant coverage of the subject, the subject cannot pass the Notability guidelines for inclusion in Wikipedia. This may lead to the deletion of the article.TR 10:53, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I just did a quick google on the article title and got over 54,000 hits. Significant finds include:
 * http://astronomy.curtin.edu.au/local/docs/astrophyspres/Magnetospheric_Eternally.pdf
 * http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9620-mysterious-quasar-casts-doubt-on-black-holes.html
 * http://www.guide-to-the-universe.com/weird-star-theories.html
 * http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0607/25quasar/
 * After that I got bored cataloguing them. It is abundantly clear that there is enough media chatter about MECOs to establish their notability. The only problem here is our editors' command of Google Search. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:37, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * And none of those would normally qualify as a reliable source. And only the newscientist one, would in any sense be admissible as evidence of notability. In the peer-reviewed literature the only mention of the subject is in papers by the main proponents.TR 20:00, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I still see this claim as untrue, although it may appear that way using the index systems TR has trusted to assess that data, or specific search terms employed. I have seen the main proponents cited in works given me for peer-review, on more than one occasion (and refereeing for more than one publication), which would be an impossibility if what TR asserts were true. JonathanD (talk) 20:57, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

I'd have been surprised if you found no citations, given how much exposure to the subject I've gotten. My intro to MECOs was from an essay entered in the 2012 FQXi essay contest, by Christian Corda - which was a posthumous publication with D.J. Leiter, and also included Robertson, Schild, and Mosquera-Cuesta as authors - Black Holes or Anything Else?. But I have since seen numerous papers by Andrew Beckwith (a GR researcher I met at FFP11) and a few papers by Steven Kenneth Kauffmann (who was a student of Feynman), as well as a handful by other authors, which have cited works on ECOs and/or MECOs. Another person I've compared notes with is New Paltz College professor Tarun Biswas, given that I live nearby, and he is rather wary about the notion that all BHCs are Black Holes, and tends to favor other models. Given that I also had conversations with Gerard 't Hooft about what GR does and does not tell us (about what happens near the EH of a BH), and what are the limitations (given limits on Lorentz invariance violations) for models of quantum gravity, you might say I've become conversant about some of the subtleties. JonathanD (talk) 16:51, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

I should mention that Corda's essay with MECO collaborators (and also my own essay) was a finalist in the 2012 contest, which implies that the collaboration paper on MECOs received extensive exposure and high regard in the peer-review (ratings by authors and members). It is notable that George F.R. Ellis (who was Hawking's co-author in '73) was also one of the entrants, was a finalist, and was one of the 2nd prize winners in the contest that year. So the message is that the subject of MECOs fared well in a contest whose entrants included several top-level experts including Ellis. JonathanD (talk) 17:05, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Is the on-line conversation between George Ellis and Christian Corda at the FQXi Forum germane to this discussion? The fact there was some discussion between them could be seen as proof that Ellis knows about MECO theory. JonathanD (talk) 17:13, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Sorry. It appears I misspoke and they never discussed it.  JonathanD (talk) 17:20, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Couple more reasonably reliable sources:
 * Kreitler, P.V. (Ed.); "New Developments in Black Hole Research", Nova 2006. ISBN-10: 159454641X ISBN-13: 978-1594546419
 * Sample, I.; "American astronomers claim that black holes may not exist", The Guardian: Space, Saturday 29 July 2006
 * Kreitler was merely editor for a piece by known MECO researchers, but its inclusion by an independent editor does evidence wider notability. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 14:40, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

No consistent usage of acronyms
One complicating factor is that there seems to be no consistent usage of names, or choices for acronyms, in the material regarding this subject or related topics. So we have both ECOs and MECOs, cited differently, although Mitra says could have been the name all along, because ECOs are magnetospheric. Similarly; Evgeniy Gaburov and colleagues talk about MLADs or Magnetically Levitating Accretion Discs (which are probably not MECOs but may be related), but other authors talk about MADs and mean exactly the same thing.

Furthermore; some authors formerly writing with MECO proponents (Corda and Mosquera-Cuesta) are now talking about Black Hole Non-linear Electrodynamics, abbreviated NLED, while others use the term NED for precisely the same phenomenology, and some of those authors make no reference to MECO proponents. So extreme variation in the use of terminology, which describes similar or sometimes identical phenomenology, makes it tough to get an accurate reading on whether the early work of MECO proponents has influenced more recent authors or not. Does a name change mean the underlying theory is different? JonathanD (talk) 21:14, 3 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a nightmare, you have my sympathy. I think the best that Wikipedia can do is to treat each of these acronyms as a distinct topic, and wait for a reliable source or two to join the dots for us. We can't make the link on our own just beacause we know it is true. It's frustrating, but it has to be this way. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:30, 4 December 2014 (UTC)