Clive Tickner(Southwold, United Kingdom (GB)):
Black holes have become the icons of modern astrophysics — mysterious objects that swallow light, warp spacetime, and ripple the universe with gravi-tational waves. Yet the very features attributed to them invite serious ques-tions.
If black holes cannot be seen, why are they so often depicted with fiery rings and luminous jets? The explanation given is that the matter outside the event horizon superheats as it falls inward, producing the brilliant accretion disks we ‘observe’. But this raises the paradox: if we see the fire, are we not al-ready seeing the hole? And if all light is dragged in, how do such radiant structures persist?
Equally problematic is the claim that black holes can pull in photons. Pho-tons, having no mass, should not be subject to a gravitational tug. The ortho-dox answer invokes spacetime curvature again: light follows “geodesics” around the hole. But this is geometry, not physics — an abstraction repack-aged as causation.
Then there are gravitational waves, allegedly produced when two black holes collide. These waves are said to propagate across billions of light years, un-touched by intervening matter, un-scattered, un-muddled, until they strike Earth and jiggle LIGO’s mirrors by less than the width of a proton. How do such delicate ripples traverse crowded cosmic space without degradation, on-ly to be stopped dead in thick concrete? How do countless overlapping waves from countless collisions not create an incoherent roar?
The mythology of black holes relies heavily on metaphor, on unseen hori-zons, and on assigning physical action to mathematical surfaces. To treat them as literal objects that swallow light, radiate rings, and send unattenuat-ed waves across the universe is to trade common-sense physics for belief.
Black holes are puzzles made of paradoxes. They deserve questioning, not worship.
Posted: February 20, 2026 @ 7:16:03 am