For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
I think the only reason those specifically are most well known, is because they capture popular imagination.
Basically, because it’s impossible to see inside black holes to know what’s going on, there’s very few ways to validate ideas. Therefore, outside of a select number of external observational techniques (like radio signals and gravitational waves) to place some limitations, ideas about what happens beyons the event horizon are in the realm of pure math, which people don’t care about unless it either A. Verifiable, or B. Just sounds really cool.
Black Hole hypotheses therefore tend to go one of a few ways:
Scenario 1
Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing
Scientist B: That requires this other thing which isn’t true, to be true, and/or breaks this fundamental law
Scientist A: This hypothesis is my precious brain baby and if you talk shit about it I will shatter your knees
Scenario 2
Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing
Scientist B: That requires an assumption we can’t, or have yet to, verify is true (almost always somehow related to string theory)
Scientist A: This hypothesis is my precious brain baby and if you talk shit about it I will shatter your knees
Scenario 3:
Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing
Scientist B: Okay the math checks out as one of X number of possibilities with that same math, but there’s know way to tell which, if any of these would be true (equations with multiple valid solutions, almost always related to spacetime topology)
Scientist A: Heehee numbers do funni
ETA: The specific subcategories of hypotheses you mentioned also have an inherent advantage of not having to deal with singularities. Why that’s good: Einstein’s theories say infinite density impossible. With singularity, can’t connect quantum theory to relativity theory. No quantum gravity make math bb’s big sad. Solution? Instead of squoosh matter really tiny, just send it somewhere else! They aren’t the only frameworks that avoid singularities, but definitely the coolest sounding and least complicated
Thank you! I love this breakdown. I had a suspicion it was like this all along but lack the astrophysics background.
Not sure why astrophysicists are so quick to pull a Tonya Harding, though.
They hate to admit it, and it’s definitely less in-your-face most of the time because of the expected formality of the scientific community, but physicists, and specifically those trying to make advancements like we see around black holes, are SUPER arrogant. For the first 2 scenarios listed, they usually only make a formal paper out of the discovery to later defend the drawback as something they can “work around”. Either by “oh we’ll definitely eventually figure out how to emperically verify this haha. Look how well it works, you’d be crazy not to believe in this”, or the more extreme “This obviously constitutes a whole rewrite of our understanding of physics because my solution is so elegant except for the parts where it literally doesn’t work”
That last one is less prone to arrogance because topology is working with an insane amount of unverifiable possibilities already, so they don’t really tend to get too attached to any given solution.