This is not a minor clarification or a technical footnote. It is a correction that cuts straight through sixty years of black-hole physics and exposes a foundational mistake that should never have made it into the field in the first place.
Not maybe. Not “arguably.”
This is a real error with real consequences — consequences so large that it’s difficult to overstate what they imply about how badly we have misunderstood black holes for decades.
My article, What if black holes never actually form?, is now live on SciTechDaily. This brings valuable exposure to a correction of bad physics that’s been masquerading as great intellectual achievement and driving much of theoretical physics research for the better part of a century.
To be absolutely clear: the question in this title is not a speculative “What if…?” in the usual sense. This is not a simple thought experiment that presents a hypothetical alternative to teh usual story. It is not a philosophical musing dressed up as physics.
It is a diagnosis.
The title’s question is meant in exactly the way we sometimes ask, “Aren’t you missing something here? What if…” And in that same way, it’s actually a polite way of pointing at the fact that we actually have indeed missed something — something significant and consequential that never should have been missed.
Because that is exactly what happened.
Something essential was left out of gravitational-collapse physics — and that omission produced decades of confusion and false inference about what black holes are, whether they “exist” in any meaningful sense, and what their supposed existence could possibly mean for the observable universe.
The article is not an invitation to imagination.
It’s an overdue correction. Here’s why.
What the article actually does
First off, it clarifies that general relativity does not issue a verdict that says black holes already exist. GR allows two ontological possibilities, and it always has:
- Collapse completes in finite time, producing an event horizon and interior “out there now.”
- Collapse never completes in external time, but instead asymptotically approaches the horizon forever.
Physicists in the 1960s adopted the first, but the formalism itself never licensed that as the only option. It was an over-interpretation, narrowing the list of valid options that are formally available by arbitrarily selecting one possibility while choosing to ignore the other.
That decision was not physics. It was an ontological commitment made subjectively and without license; a metaphysical preference snuck into physics, falsely framed as a formal consequence.
And from that one commitment — that unlicensed, preferential narrowing of the space of possibilities — an entire theoretical superstructure was built.
The step that was missed
Empirical observations cannot distinguish between possibilities 1 and 2. This is a fact of causality that’s well-established in relativity: due to the finite speed of light, we aren’t able to say what is really going on “out there” beyond our past light cone.
If the Sun stopped shining right now, for instance, we wouldn’t know that happened for 8 minutes. The Sun is 8 light minutes away from us, so it would take 8 minutes for the information to get to us. In the meantime, we’d continue seeing photons the Sun emitted within the past 8 minutes, which are already on their way.
In the case of black holes, there are valid relativistic descriptions of gravitational collapse according to which the collapse is still happening now, and will continue happening forever; in other cases, collapse completes after finite time intervals.
But the distinction between these two formally valid options lies forever outside our past light cone. We can’t actually know which one is the true state; it’s causally forbidden.
Thus, while the ontological distinction can never be observationally settled, both remain live possibilities as far as the theory itself is concerned.
And once you honestly acknowledge that, one critical constraint becomes unavoidable:
Every observational consequence must remain compatible with both.
This constraint does not mean merely: “No observation can require completed black holes” — though that is true. But the critical constraint means something even stronger than this:
Any physical claim that would only hold if collapse has already completed — which is incompatible with the equally valid alternative possibility that collapsing objects may remain collapsing towards their horizons for all time — is simply illegitimate.
In other words, if an inferred consequence of black hole physics would require the collapsing body to have already formed a horizon, and is not compatible with the possibility that the horizon is not yet formed, that inference is invalid.
Plain and simple. Unambiguous.
Therefore, if an alleged phenomenon would disappear the moment you admit that in reality horizons and singularities might not yet exist, that the collapsing object might forever remain in the process of collapsing, then it is not “unsettled physics.” It is a false inference.
It’s not a philosophical issue — it’s an issue of false inference leading to belief in consequences that are formally prohibited
This is not about interpretation, worldview, or philosophical preference. The mistake was not simply that physicists chose one ontological picture of black holes over another. Even if one grants, for the sake of argument, the “already-collapsed” picture in which horizons and singularities exist somewhere in the global space-time, that choice does not license any new physical inferences about the observable universe.
No inference is permitted that would fail under the equally valid alternative in which collapse has not completed and may never complete from the external universe’s standpoint.
This is the part that has been consistently misunderstood; it’s the point that must sink in before we can move forward with the requisite clarity and safeguards against misunderstanding.
Choosing an ontology does not change the causal structure. And the causal structure is what determines what is physically meaningful.
In Schwarzschild and Kerr space-times, no event on or inside an event horizon is ever in any external observer’s past light cone. That fact does not depend on whether one believes the horizon “exists” in a global sense; it follows from the geometry alone. Everything we can ever observe must lie within our past light cone, and a completed horizon never does.
Only the still-collapsing object, still outside its horizon, remains causally connected to the outside universe. Or, in more epistemic terms: when the photons and gravitational waves we see now were emitted, the collapsing object was still larger than its horizon.
This remains true always. Every point in the outside universe can only receive information sent prior to horizon formation, while the collapsing object was still larger than its horizon.
Even if a horizon does exist somewhere in the full space-time, it can never be physically operative in the external universe. It can never influence what we observe. Otherwise, it would violate the key principle above, that all physically valid reasoning must remain compatible with the possibility that the object we forever observe to “have been” still collapsing truly is, and forever remains, still collapsing.
If our reasoning conflicts with that ontological possibility, we know it must be false. Because the geometry itself admits both ontological descriptions which share one causal structure.
In this sense, what this key constraint provides is a validation reference point that physicists can — and arguably should, because the results must remain consistent with it regardless — use when reasoning about and calculating the consequences of black hole physics. The point then is that the principle, that predicted results must be consistent with both possible ontologies, becomes an epistemic anchor — a conceptual and theoretical reference point that’s useful for validating hypothetical reasoning.
So the crucial error was not metaphysical in the narrow sense. Physicists did not merely prefer one ontological picture. They misunderstood what that picture was allowed to imply in a world governed by causal structure, and treated “already collapsed” as though it entitled them to make claims that conflict with the forever-collapsing possibility — even though that possibility is permanently live and empirically indistinguishable.
Any inference that would cease to hold if collapse were not yet complete is therefore illegitimate. The test is simple: if a claim depends for its truth on a horizon already existing in order to influence observable reality, then it is not merely unconfirmed. It is incompatible with the causal architecture of the geometry. And once causal contact is taken seriously, nothing in black-hole physics is allowed to depend on whether a horizon or singularity “exists” in some unreachable part of a global manifold.
The mistake was not choosing the wrong picture and ignoring the other. It was so much deeper and nastier than that. The mistake was developing a mental image of black holes based on the one interpretation that’s unfaithful to the basic causal structure, ignoring the causal fallacy associated with imagining a horizon that is causally connected to the outside world, and then deriving physical consequences on the back of that error.
What collapses once you remove the illicit inference
The initial error was metaphysical: assuming that collapse has already completed.
But everything downstream from that inference is not metaphysics. Everything that requires that metaphysical commitment to be true, while ignoring causality and the possibility that collapse may still be happening, is simply wrong.
Once the missing ontological possibility — that black holes might still be collapsing — is restored, and the causal structure of the geometry is respected, entire pillars of black-hole physics fall away at once:
- Hawking radiation requires a completed horizon; it simply doesn’t happen if the horizon does not yet exist → therefore it is not merely unobserved, but unobservable.
- Information loss rests on Hawking radiation → therefore the paradox never arises.
- Cosmic censorship exists to hide singularities, but those singularities might not even exist → there is nothing to censor when physics must always be compatible with the possibility that the collapsing object remains forever in its collapsing state.
- “Black hole mergers” detected by LIGO cannot involve completed black holes, since those are not compatible with the possibility that objects may be still collapsing. And on causal considerations alone it’s clear that every gravitational wave ever recorded must have been emitted while both objects were still larger than their event horizons — since that’s the only type of information we can ever receive.
These are not philosophical objections. They are logical consequences forced by the light cones.
What kind of correction this actually is
Most scientific revolutions are driven by evidence. A new observation appears, an anomaly accumulates, a prediction fails, and a framework is revised to come back into contact with the world. That is not what has happened here.
This is not a case where nature contradicted theory. It is a case where theory was misread from the beginning.
No new telescope was required. No instrument disagreed. No observation forced revision. What failed was not empirical adequacy, but interpretation: a set of physical claims was quietly read into a mathematical formalism that never supplied them. A global geometrical structure was treated as an empirical object. An ambiguous result was treated as an already-settled affair. A mathematical inevitability was mistaken for physical actuality.
This is why the correction presented here feels different from ordinary scientific change. It is not the replacement of one model by another. It is the withdrawal of claims that were never licensed by the theory in the first place.
General relativity never required that collapse be ontologically complete in the external universe, and it never permitted the physical inferences that resulted from a misread of the traditionally inferred ontology. The theory admits multiple global descriptions of collapse, and causal structure enforces a single constraint across all of them: everything observable must lie in a past light cone, and event horizons never do. Any claim whose content depends on a horizon “already existing” in order to influence the observable universe is therefore not merely untested. It is incompatible with the theory’s own causal architecture.
The result is not a philosophical disagreement layered on top of sound physics. It is a correction of invalid entailments drawn from a correct mathematical description. The equations were never wrong. What was wrong was what was claimed to follow from them.
Seen in this light, several long-standing pillars of black-hole physics do not fail because of experimental pressure. They fail because they violate the inferential limits imposed by the geometry itself. Hawking radiation, information loss, cosmic censorship, and the naïve interpretation of gravitational-wave mergers all depend, in different ways, on treating horizons as physically active entities in the observable universe. But general relativity never allows this. A structure that never enters any past light cone cannot participate in any empirical process.
The framework must shift from logically invalid inference to one that is finally consistent with the physical formalism. But this shift is not driven by any new data, but by the recognition of a category mistake that never should have been allowed to exist.
This also explains why the response to such a correction is unlikely to take the form of ordinary scientific dispute. A claim shown to be false by data can be amended. A claim shown to be ill-formed is simply withdrawn. What this work challenges is not a prediction, but a permission — the permission to say certain things within physics at all.
This is therefore not a contribution in the familiar sense of adding something new. It is subtraction. It removes statements that should never have entered the literature, never should have been repeated, and never should have been inherited as physics.
Nothing here depends on taste, preference, or interpretation. The issue is validity. Either a claim follows from the theory and respects its causal structure, or it does not. And when it does not, it does not become “controversial.” It becomes false.
The question, in the end, is not whether black holes exist “out there” in some global sense. The question is whether any of the things we have been told follow from their existence actually do. When causal structure is taken seriously, the answers quietly change. And once that happens, much of what was thought to be deep mystery turns out instead to have been built on a quiet misunderstanding.
cosmiCave.org 
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