Can't do science assuming we experience an abnormal number of improbabilities in anything we do. Improbabilities can happen, but as a net average the sum of various weird shit must be normal or we can't do science. Sole exception being where those improbabilities, or a large number of them, cause our ability to do science, which is to say, why there is complex life on Earth. If you go into the lab, flip five coins 5 times each and get heads each time, you have to assume the coins are biased even though the odds of that are about 1 in 30 million of naturally occurring, if you don't you can never get any science done. Most logical answer to the abnormal amount of queer crap in our neighborhood is simply that we observe our neighborhood in greater detail, even though Fermi Paradox implies pretty strongly that some of that weird stuff is probably weird stuff that's responsible in part for our being here to observe it.



Well really you didn't sensationalize it, the media does, scientific phenomena that make mention of either 'black hole' or 'event horizon' are horrifyingly more likely to be mentioned, and journalists are also horribly lazy, not that they have much choice, they can't be experts in everything an editors run interesting stories and sack journalists who don't produce them, 'publish or perish' and all. This why I bitch about that Disney Black Hole movie. [which reviewing in preview mode I find disturbingly ironic you bring up later, presumably I've bitched about it before]




Well you need to think a little outside the macroscopic and intuitive scale when thinking about force interactions. A virtual particle acting as a force interchange shoots out of proton and hits an electron, somehow drawing it nearer, something you'll never achieve at our level of reality by throwing abjects at another object. The laws governing our level of things are essentially the byproducts of statistical events at the quantum level, the ball could pass through the floor rather than bounce, but a trillion coin flips would have to come up heads for that to happen, and actually a trillion is way, way low and of course it's not one in a trillion but 1 in 2 to the trillionth+ power. The powerful trio of forces have negative counterparts, the really weak one doesn't. Why? No clue, and you know my views on string theory and brane and all that. Hand me evidence or it's not science, hand me a theory which even if true could never be proved and it's just math, brilliant math, quite possibly true math, but still just math and speculation, no different from solipsism. The fact is gravity is a very weak force with no known repulsive force and both real scientists and cranks have spent a lot of time vigorously seeking it and come up with squat. Thus far, anyway. Personally I've never understood the point of even creating a theory which couldn't be proved except as a temporary mental lynch pin for one's sanity, better to shelve the sucker and try again later when you know more. Currently there is no evidence supporting explaining why Gravity is weak and only attractive, it is possible it is not weak or does have a repulsive component, there is no evidence to support that currently.



Hawking radiation conceptually is straight forward. Assuming virtual particles exist, particles pop up from the Quantum void in pairs non-stop and then disappear, especially near event horizons. If this happens at the very edge of an event horizon, one on each side of it, physics demands the one inside not leave. If the other is outside, then it may in some cases not re-enter, if it is a photon or neutrino it basically would have a 50/50 chance of having momentum that carried it away from the black hole and is moving at light speed just beyond the point where that is sufficient to not fall in. That particles energy is deducted from the total energy of the black hole, causing a mass reduction, same as when photons are emitted by stars or you and I. Totally different animal then Merger Recoil, as mentioned.

Also, unless I'm wrong, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the 'merger' part their implies an incomplete process. Black holes A and B attempting to merge and make C fail and shoot away. The two black holes do NOT shoot away from each other. Now, there is a problem - a different problem - in getting black holes close together, known as the 'Final Parsec Problem' but that's a whole different issue and there are proposed solutions that handle it, regardless it's a different problem.



Mentioning that damn abomination of a Disney movie never is calculated to improve my mood.

The reason everything doesn't just tip into a black hole is because unless you're very close to one it behaves just like anything else of parallel mass, and an accretion disc is something fairly specific, the term isn't meant to apply to solar systems like ours. Just because the forces involved remain the same doesn't mean a solar system and an accretion disc are the same, or a galactic disc, anymore than an asteroid and a super-massive star are the same. Sol is NOT inside the Milk Way's singularity because a singularity is a point like object (or very nearly) nor it's Event Horizon because that has a specific location. It is inside the Core's gravitational influence and vice-versa, but then pretty much everything we can see is... not necessarily everything though. As I take pains to remind people, the Observable Universe is a very large object centered around the Earth which is constantly expanding, that expansion is not the same as Hubble Expansion and red shift, nor is the Observable Universe the same as the Universe thought they obviously get used synonymously a lot. Two different expansions, one caused by 'something???' maybe Dark Energy, and the other caused by the simple passage of time, we can see further because stuff further away can report in. It is inside our light cone. Now, depending on context gravity travels at the speed of light, and... insert stuff about General Relativity, go look up 'Speed of Gravity'




A little knowledge of Chemistry and physics is needed to even make the mistake of seeing an endothermic reaction as a violation of thermodynamics too. Gravitic propulsion doesn't require anti-gravity, just non-symmetric GW emission, same as a flashlight rocketing along butt-end first through space doesn't require 'anti-light'.



I'm not a huge fan of Unified Forces, it may well be that GUF is the case but I think people pursue it with maniacal obsessiveness. Just because the other three, which are much stronger, are related, doesn't mean the fourth and far weaker one with totally different characteristics is. I wouldn't call it a windmill or white whale but for some people one of those two definitely applies.




It's apparent lack of observable polarity. I add the distinction to emphasize that 'observable' is the important constraining factor here more than whether it is or is not real.



Joel, my irritation here isn't out of you being curious about astrophysics, or the non-complete nature of that science. My irritation is your patent refusal to go beyond the amateur level of this while insisting on challenging those of us who have. Common enough, like most physicists I'm pretty smug about how unlike most fields we don't whip out the 'because I said so' expertise argument very much, but sometimes the 'because I said so' applies. It's the reason you don't see me contradicting Celia about veterinary medicine, she hardly knows it all and I'm hardly ignorant of it, but she's knows way more than I do about it and if she says 'No, definitely not' about a solution to something weird I am going to accept that at 99% likely to be the case but more importantly I am going to accept that I am way less than 1% likely to find the answer if it isn't unless I spend several years studying the field. Yes, I am generally happy to answer questions about this stuff, and yes, I hate when others in my field, some on this site, take the obnoxious attitude toward explanation, but there is a line where I do need to stop you and say 'No, Definitely not, that solution simply isn't a logical extraction or line of pursuit' at which point you either need to abandon it or sit down and get your own degree in the field to prove me wrong. This isn't a movie or a book, people do not 'accidentally' stumble across answers in fields they aren't experts in.