http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/07/2012759585764599.html (at minutes 09:00–10:10, 11:00–12:03, 12:35–13:25, 16:08–17:13) gave me a world-wide forum again. The rest of the media and all colleagues of mine keep their mouths shut.
There is logic behind this schizophrenic world-wide attitude: In case the outlaw is right, one can later always claim that not the whole planet was part of the conspiracy of silence since one high-ranking international outlet reported. However, this strategy is not logical. For if I am right and the worst case materializes, the fig leaf will go under as well.
My class yesterday in which this riddle was touched upon in passing helped me see the mechanism: My results on black holes are too much advanced from the planet-wide accepted lore to be understandable to any colleague.
Imagine the “generic 3-pseudosphere.” Its lower-dimensional analog in ordinary 3-space, the 2-pseudosphere (the so-called Newton pseudosphere) looks like two trumpets with infinitely long, infinitely thinned-out mouth pieces, glued together head-on with their bells ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Pseudosphere.jpg ). This smooth monster has the same volume as a sphere of the same (maximal) diameter, and also the same surface area and the same (if negative) curvature: a kind of miracle. Hence the name “pseudo-sphere.”
By cutting it in the middle to take only one half of it, and then making the trumpet generic by giving it a non-zero asymptotic radius – the Schwarzschild radius – at its infinitely far-away tip (and adding one dimension), you get the correct reality of the space surrounding a black hole. Although there is beautiful related work by Yu Tian at al. ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0411004.pdf ), this is beyond the heads of the whole community. They simply cannot follow.
My late friend Benoit Mandelbrot created a storm with the opposite insight – that there are compact finite volumes with an infinite surface area. In the present dual case, the little ant on the flat outer rim of the trumpet, headed for the middle, cannot believe that the way towards the latter (the so-called “horizon”) is infinitely long. No one saw this before.
But this is “art for art’s sake,” is it not? No: this is physics. And, strangely, the survival of the planet hinges on a single person of public clout believing me.
Thank you, everyone, for kindly having bent your mind.