At https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/06/17/rethinking-the-black-hole-singularity/ … there doesn’t appear to be many, if any, astrophysicists amongst the commenters but this is to me a bit of a coincidence. The link above refers to two research papers from 2026. Was Einstein right and was Swarzschild right in 2016 when he claimed to have confirmed Einstein’s equations for a single spherical mass. Swarzschild didn’t use any old spherical mass. His prediction was made on a perfect spherical mass. This evolved, we are told, many moons later, into the event horizon, the boundary around a black hole. However, the WattsUpWithThat article is not all of the story as I found out a couple of weeks ago after picking up a book in a National Trust second hand book shop. It had the title, ‘Battle of the Big Bang: the new tales of our cosmic origins‘ by Mayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper. When I got it home I realised it was still in mint condition. A real bargain as it was a hardback copy. The pages do not seem to have been turned over very much, apart from a flick and a scan. How far did they get in reading the book? It looked like not very far at all. It could not have been what they had been expecting.
It was published in 2025, a year prior to the two papers in the link above. They should be viewed in the context of the ups and downs in cosmological theoretical physics. Most of the the black hole research is based on some assumptions, it seems to me. One kind or another. Even the idea of a black hole is a theoretical construct. Again, the product of theoretical physicists. No actual evidence in the physical world is available as even the way stars work and the idea of the microwave background radiation, is again, an assumption based on consensus cosmology. Both Afshordi and Halper seem to believe, without questioning, the reality of the Big Bang and Black Holes. Hence, they have to favour one of the several major theories of how these things developed. The book is illuminating as it explains the various stages since the early 20th century that the models have been created, on the back of various former cosmologists. Both are singularities and both are liked in various ways to each other. From Einstein to Penrose, from Hawking to Bekinstein, and from Steinhardt to Afshordi, we are walked through worm holes, string gas theory, the loop, and inflation rather than expansion. The latter moves too fast so it was slowed down and inflation was pulled out of the hat. Big Bang, it is accepted, was not an explosion in the normal sense but the creation of an enormous cloud of plasma in a tangled and opaque cloud like formation that started accelerating away from whatever it was at the very beginning. The plasma gradually dissipated and light became visible. We are told that no matter how big a telescope is built at any time in the future it will not be able to see what happened at the Big Bang singularity. The plasma cloud will obscure what is there – as it is so dense and fog like. The similarity with black holes, which are so dense that what is inside them is invisible. It is just too dense.
I thought it was worth noting the role of plasma in Big Bang, and a possibility it has a role in black holes, but plasma physics does not seem to have caught up with the dynamics of exploding meteors in the atmosphere. Gunther Keletschka’s response to Mark Boslough and his pals, in regards the airburst postulated at Hammam, we well as the Tunguska event, was quite scathing as it ignored plasma and an electric current. It turns out he is a very clever fellow – see for example https://www.uaf.edu/news/uaf-professors-work-is-a-step-toward-elusive-theory-of-everything.php …. which hoves into some of the stuff in the above book such as three dimensional time, unifying quantum mechanics, the behaviour of particles at the smallest scales, and so on to the quantum theory of gravity etc.