Brave New Stars Revisited

Well, Wolfgang has borrowed Jaques Distler's flaming spear to deflate my black hole heresies, and a darn good job they have done of it. Unfortunately, I seem to have forgotten a key lesson of the Penrose and Hawking results, that the special features of the global picture don't seem to depend on anything special about the local picture.

There is something infuriatingly obtuse and arrogant about a paper that starts with:

Event horizons and closed time-like curves cannot exist in the real world for the simple reason that they are inconsistent with
quantum mechanics.

As Chapline's "Dark Energy Star" paper (astro-ph/0503200) does.

You could just as well turn it around: "QM can't be right because it conflicts with GR." Most infuriatingly, he acts like this is some kind of revelation, as though that very point had not been the main preoccupation of many of the greatest physicists for the past half century.

Having said that, I still pine for a horizon that is locally special.

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