Symmetric collapse into a black hole happens very quickly

UPDATE March 31, 2023: The claims might be true, after all. See our new blog post.

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UPDATE March 25, 2023: The claims in this blog post are probably false. See our new blog post.

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Our Minkowski & newtonian model of gravity claims that the slow speed of light close to the horizon of a black hole is due to extra inertia that a photon borrows from the large mass of the black hole.

When the photon moves, it transports its own mass-energy and energy in the gravity field. The extra inertia comes from the energy of the field which the photon moves around.

In this analysis it is relevant that it is an individual photon.

We have earlier written about the fact that a radial motion of a symmetric shell of matter does not seem to acquire extra inertia, in contrast to a translational motion of a test mass.

The electromagnetic analogue

                                  |

                                  | 

                                  +

                               _____

                            /            \

       ------        +  |                |  +        --------- field line

                            \______/

                                  +

                                  |

                                  |

Let us have a spherical dust shell with electric charge.  The electric repulsion starts to expand the shell.

Is there extra inertia that the electric field gives to dust particles?

                             |    --------------------------

                             |    --------------------------

                             +

                              ------>      

  zero              wall of           electric field

  field               dust

Probably not. We can interpret the process this way: as the shell grows larger, dust particles harvest energy from the electric field in their immediate neighborhood and convert it to their kinetic energy.

The energy does not need to move over large distances. The field outside the shell remains constant and the field inside the shell is zero.

The process is radially symmetric and essentially one-dimensional.

Let us then have two concentric shells of charged dust. Again, when the shells start to expand, they can collect energy from the field in their immediate neighborhood and convert it to kinetic energy.

A uniform ball of dust is like many concentric shells. We conjecture that there is no extra inertia in the expansion of a ball.

Collapse of a uniform ball of dust into a black hole

This is the Oppenheimer-Snyder collapse.

1. The electromagnetic analogue suggests that there is no extra inertia in the process. 

2. Another argument for no extra inertia: when the entire mass M of the ball moves, then the conceivable extra inertia which it could give to itself might be at most ~ M. Thus, the extra inertia would not be very large.

3. It would be somewhat strange if the mass M would be able to resist a uniform movement of the same mass M by giving itself extra inertia. The mass M cannot give itself extra inertia if we move the mass M translationally through space.

We conjecture that in a collapse of a spherically symmetric mass, there is no extra inertia.

Our conjecture implies that the collapse into a "singularity", or a very dense object, happens almost at the speed of light, as seen by a faraway observer.

Conclusions

Previously, we had thought that the collapse into a very dense object is an extremely slow process in our Minkowski & newtonian gravity. It turns out that the collapse is very fast.

Even though a single photon moves very slowly just above the horizon or inside the horizon, a symmetric large mass can sink very rapidly toward the center.

We need to figure out what happens at the center after the collapse.