Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize for showing black holes are real and General Relativity predicts the existence of a singularity at their center. But recently, another black hole pioneer, Roy Kerr, claimed there was a mistake in Penrose's proof. This was hyped widely across the media by the likes of Sabine Hoseenfelder, PBS Spacetime, Anton Petrov, and Ethan Siegel. Sabine Hossenfelder especially praises Kerr's work.
However, leading relativists say Kerr makes simple errors, and his conclusion is totally unfounded. Here, we talk to these experts and explain how science popularisers got their physics so badly wrong. Nobody claims that singularities are real, but the singularity theories are powerful signposts to new physics, probably requiring a quantum theory of gravity to resolve.
A timeline of the video is here:
00:00 introduction
01:20 Need for quantum gravity
02:20 geodesic
5:00 types of geodesics
5:35 types of time
6:20 affine parameter
8:16 Kerr's argument
10:37 Highly misleading
12:28 Finding Kerr's core error
15:18 PBs spacetime
17:50 The mistake of the Popularisers
20:40 We are not idiots