Nothing gets Forrest interested in a conversation better than modern physics :-)
: How doy ou know black holes aren't hols? How is it that
: you know exactly wat black holes do, and what they
: have to do with, when even the foremost expers readily
: admit that everything put forward so far on black
: holes is based on theory, not fact?
This is a personal pet peeve I picked up from Steve Gould, but a theory is not a "lesser fact" as you could call it. It's entirely different from a fact, and being theoretical does not make something unfactual, or vice versa.
Fact: apple tend to fall downward until their attraction to the ground can no longer overpower other forces keeping them from rolling.
Theory: apples have a natural state of rest on the ground.
Theory: all matter attracts other matter with a force directly proportional to it's mass and inversely proportional to it's distance.
Fact: apples fall up.
One of these facts is usually true, and one of these theories is for most intents and purposes valid. The other theory actually is valid under most circumstances (given a specific range of frictions and air densities, apples will tend to wind up resting at the lowest point they can reach), and even the other fact could be true under certain unusual circumstances.
The point I'm getting too is that fact and theory are not different levels of certainty in a statement. Facts are statements of something being so; they are "this IS that" statements, and they can be true or false. Theories are explanations of why something is so, used to predict that other things could be so; they are "this is that BECAUSE that" statements, and are neither true nor false but rather valid or invalid. If a theory makes useful (accurate) predictions of fact, it's said to be valid.
So just being "theoretical" does not make something in any way unlikely. I theorize that you are being attracted to the Earth right now, because EVERYTHING ELSE I've ever seen has been attracted to the Earth, so the theory that everything is attracted to the Earth seems pretty valid. You could have a negative mass or something, and be sitting on your ceiling right now, but there's no thing to suggest that is so.
Black holes could be where God accidentally set his cigarette down on the fabric of reality, but the theories of gravity we have today say they're something else, and since those those theories hole true almost all the time (except on quantum scales, but black holes are big things), it seems pretty damn likely that that's a factual explanation/.
That was a lot longer than I intended it, sorry.
: Black holes may very well have a lot to do with time, it
: has been theorized about for years now that one of the
: gateways to time travel may be through manipulations
: of wormholes (the doorways of which are supposedly
: black holes).
Not quite. Wormholes are LIKE black holes, and some black holes MAY be wormholes, but they are not neccesarily the same. A wormhole could have a non-black-hole mouth, and a black hole could just crush you into a Planck hypercube.
[the rest of this was fine and good, I just felt like nitpicking science tonight]
SCIENCE!
