Falsification is, in general, not actually a useful metric, because evidence and strength of belief are quantitative and the space of hypotheses is larger than we can actually scan.
I’d note that the layperson’s description of a black hole is, in fact, false. Squeezing a given mass into a singularity doesn’t make it heavier. The mass stays the same, but the density goes up. Even as it collapses into a black hole, the Schwartzchild radius will be much smaller than the original object’s size—about 3km for a 1 solar mass black hole. If you personally could do the squeezing on a small enough object, what would happen is eventually the object would go from resisting collapse to sustaining collapse, then explode with the light of a billion suns. For a tiny fraction of a second during that process it would leave behind a core that, in an ultramicroscopic volume of space, kept light from escaping.
This actually poses a kind of Gettier problem. If you try squeezing things really hard, and correctly weigh the evidence, you’d decide the theory was probably false. And it is false. But the experiment doesn’t prove anything.
The next side to the resolution is: What do you mean the Roman commoner “has a theory”? Where did it come from? Why is he thinking about it at all, or giving it any credence? If alien beings with godlike powers descended from the heavens and tried to explain relativity, but this is what he misunderstood, that’s actually pretty strong evidence for both this and the existence of gods! Or if he made it up, how or why is that what he made up?
And of course: sometimes the road to a correct understanding goes through a maze of contradictions and things you don’t have any valid frame of reference to interpret. Science and reason don’t promise an answer to resolvable questions soon. And there probably are lots of questions that are unanswerable in principle, including sometimes the question of which questions are unanswerable in principle.
Falsification is, in general, not actually a useful metric, because evidence and strength of belief are quantitative and the space of hypotheses is larger than we can actually scan.
I’d note that the layperson’s description of a black hole is, in fact, false. Squeezing a given mass into a singularity doesn’t make it heavier. The mass stays the same, but the density goes up. Even as it collapses into a black hole, the Schwartzchild radius will be much smaller than the original object’s size—about 3km for a 1 solar mass black hole. If you personally could do the squeezing on a small enough object, what would happen is eventually the object would go from resisting collapse to sustaining collapse, then explode with the light of a billion suns. For a tiny fraction of a second during that process it would leave behind a core that, in an ultramicroscopic volume of space, kept light from escaping.
This actually poses a kind of Gettier problem. If you try squeezing things really hard, and correctly weigh the evidence, you’d decide the theory was probably false. And it is false. But the experiment doesn’t prove anything.
The next side to the resolution is: What do you mean the Roman commoner “has a theory”? Where did it come from? Why is he thinking about it at all, or giving it any credence? If alien beings with godlike powers descended from the heavens and tried to explain relativity, but this is what he misunderstood, that’s actually pretty strong evidence for both this and the existence of gods! Or if he made it up, how or why is that what he made up?
And of course: sometimes the road to a correct understanding goes through a maze of contradictions and things you don’t have any valid frame of reference to interpret. Science and reason don’t promise an answer to resolvable questions soon. And there probably are lots of questions that are unanswerable in principle, including sometimes the question of which questions are unanswerable in principle.