> But near the center of a black hole or in the first moments of the universe, Einstein’s equations break.
Not really. The formation and continuous description of a singularity is somewhat unique in physics, but general relativity continues to provide a description, allowing even accurate descriptions of black hole mergers. The problem with the cosmic singularity is instead a lack of observation of anything before it: maybe our universe really did begin there.
Of course, inflation, dark matter and dark energy are all outstanding questions, but they don't break general relativity, even if they represent some missing extension like general relativity represents to the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
But actually what happens when they merge is that the event horizon are the ones which gets merged and the then the two singularities comea into contact and they merge together. The resulting singularity will be be more massive of the individual singularities. You will get a singularity where GR breaks down.
The process of black holes merge is somehow can be understood without referring at all to singularity.
Yes, due to the causal structure, but you can also refer to the singularities. The simulation of black hole mergers can be carried out both by excision method and moving puncture method. The existence of black swans does not disprove white swans, it simply proves that black swans exist.
General relativity has absolutely no problem describing singularities. The existence of a singularity is not in and of itself evidence of a breakdown. Annihilation of matter via singularity formation may be the correct description of the laws of physics. We have no evidence to the contrary and it is a prediction of our best theory of gravity.
I agree with you here. Just I was referring that Black hole mergers is not something that can be taken as an example here talking about singularities.
But yes, existence of singularities does not mean a breakdown of GR. It suggests that GR is not a complete theory of gravity and means that ww cannot make a meaningful prediction about behavior of the system at the singularity points. We can even consider that GR predicts singularities when the curvature of the spacetime becomes so strong that it becomes infinite.
You are missing my point. It is entirely possible that GR is a complete theory of gravity. The final fate of collapse could be merely a simple singularity. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary and, if general relativity is correct, no way for the scientific community to ever know.
Not really. The formation and continuous description of a singularity is somewhat unique in physics, but general relativity continues to provide a description, allowing even accurate descriptions of black hole mergers. The problem with the cosmic singularity is instead a lack of observation of anything before it: maybe our universe really did begin there.
Of course, inflation, dark matter and dark energy are all outstanding questions, but they don't break general relativity, even if they represent some missing extension like general relativity represents to the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.