Karl Popper would have been sent spinning at a headline like that. Our knowledge of Black holes as physical objects is hardly affected by someone mathematically

Karl Popper would have been sent spinning at a headline like that. Our knowledge of Black holes as physical objects is hardly affected by someone mathematically “proving” that a mathematical model is consistent. Only empirical observations/experiments can change physical fact. This confusion of mathematics with physics is not helping us understand the Universe as it really is. At most, this many lead to a prediction that may be falsified, but we kinda had the “stability of black holes” on the todo list already. I know people who stare at protons to see if they really are stable. Current lifetime is around 1e39 years or something… Now I’m ranting on (sorry, this is bad HN etiquette), I both enjoy and regret the seemingly reverence of the physical “laws” by non-physicists. Applicability is not equal to universality, great mathematical models of physical phenomena such as Electromagnetism, General Relativity and the whole Quantum Field Complex, are testaments to the human imagination and resourcefulness, but they are just someone’s mathematical representation of an idea about how the universe act. We should be more aggressively prodding at the weak points of these models but also seek to explore novel representations of the same phenomena with the hope of new predictive power from changing the basis. I also hoped for more “general searches” and robotic experimentation to allow experiments without the “bias” of the theorists imagination to influence the way we look for new physics.