Strange

We don't know. More importantly, we can't know.

I also find the technology behind this much more amazing than the actual results!

It's a black hole! All we can know is that it has a certain mass, size, spin and electric charge.

That is the existence of the balloon displacing water. Not "non-existence". This also has nothing to do with mass, gravity, or the limited range of gravity.

Yes, that is what he said. You seem to think you have found something new. But we know changes in gravity, and changes in electromagnetic fields, propagate at the speed of light. So I don't know what your point is.

To get back to the topic of the thread ... A nice overview of what we have learned from the first results from the EHT (including ruling out some alternative models): https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/04/11/10-deep-lessons-from-our-first-image-of-a-black-holes-event-horizon/ Also touches on some of the information we should get from further observation and analysis: polarisation data telling us about magnetic fields, the cause of flares from black holes, finding more black holes with the higher resolution now available.

I didn't ask you about "The existence of mass causes none-existence in space-time cause space-time to displace and bend" I asked you about "the mass existence is philosophical". That makes no sense. How can the existence of mass cause non-existence? How can non-existence cause space-time to bend? There is no evidence for any such beginning. Mass isn't just "created". Mass and energy are conserved.

I don’t know. But I still think it is pointless. I know some religious people who are quite aware of such contradictions in the Bible and just shrug. Such inaccuracies are irrelevant to what they believe. There are a small number of people who insist every word must be true (“if the Bible and reality are in conflict then it must be reality that is wrong”) but they are not going to be influenced by anything Dawkins says, anyway.

What does that mean? Mass is a physical property that we can measure si don’t think there is any doubt about its existence.

Well put. I think Dawkins is attacking the wrong target, anyway. There are religious people who are rational, critical thinkers, good scientists, etc. And there are people who make irrational arguments, are anti-science and anti-knowledge for reasons other than religion (politics, power, etc). Showing people the benefits that science brings, introducing them to critical thinking, etc. are more generally useful strategies than attacking religion.

In what way is that evidence for: Please support your answer with quantitative data (in other words, evidence) not just more vague platitudes.

Sadly, that can't tell us whether or not the fuzzball theory is correct or not because the overall size is the same in both cases.

Yep. We need a throw of quantum gravity to give us a better clue to what might be going on. The only quantum model of black holes I am aware of so far is from string theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzball_(string_theory)

We don't know if it can! The matter might be concentrated in something the size of a house. Or it might be evenly distributed throughout the black hole. We just don't know.

The mass is abut 6.6 billion solar masses. The radius of the event horizon can be calculated from that is about 12 billion miles: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=schwarzschild+radius+of+6.6e9+solar+masses

That is not the thing that powers a black hole. It is the point at which the mathematics fails to produce meaningful results. It probably failed to match reality before that. What "powers" a black hole is its mass (and angular moment and electric charge). That's all.

You did. It is an intriguing analogy. I'm trying to think how that could relate to consciousness. It seems completely different to me. I am going to have to think about it some more. Would you go so far as to say that it could even behave exactly as if it were self aware? Even claiming that it is self aware?

Do you mean singularity? That has zero size (and doesn't;t really exist). The event horizon has a diameter of about 250 Astronomical Units (about 4x1010 km) ... if my calculation is correct! The singularity is the centre of the black hole (so not visible, even if it existed) and has zero size.

It's a disk: the accretion disk. Or at least the brightest, inner part. In the case of M87 we are almost aligned with the axis of rotation, which is why the ring is nearly symmetrical. But if you see it from side on, it doesn't;t appear to be a disk, because gravitational lensing (see also: Interstellar). That's the one. I was just about to try and watch it (if I can find some headphones!)

Actually, whatever the angle, you can always see the whole accretion disk (including the part behind the black hole!) and you can always observe most of the "shadow" of the event horizon because it absorbs all the light that would stop you seeing it. I think I saw another thread that might explain the "shadow" concept; it is basically the photon sphere, so the black area is much larger than the event horizon.

I was just about to post this, which partly answers it: From: https://xkcd.com/2135/ It is from the accretion disk. M87 is a fairly active black hole - see the massive polar jets in the second image in that Forbes article.

This article, reviewing the work done on simulated imaging of black holes done since 1972, has some great images: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11196.pdf Figure 8 is a simpler version of the image later generated by ray-tracing for Inception. But in this, the dots are all drawn by hand! Figure 12 shows what the black hole would look like from different angles relative to the accretion disk.

Also, a wavelength short enough to give reasonable resolution. Good discussion of this and all the other issues here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/04/10/black-holes-are-real-and-spectacular-and-so-are-their-event-horizons/ (including why M87 before Sagitarius A*)

Microwave. It has to be something that can be detected on Earth (ie through the atmosphere) and also a low-enough frequency that signals from multiple source can be combined coherently. (I have tabs open with papers describing some of the processing involved but haven't had chance to read them yet)

If there is something biological about consciousness, such that a TM-equivalent computer cannot have consciousness, it raises an interesting question. We can (in principle) simulate all the internal chemical and physical processes of a cell. We can also simulate the interaction of multiple cells. So it would seem a logical conclusion that we could (again, in principle, ignoring the awesome complexity) simulate the interaction of all the cells that make up the brain (plus, if necessary, the rest of the nervous system, blood chemistry, hormone levels, external stimuli, etc). So if consciousness can't be created by a computer, it implies one (or more) of those stages has to be non-simulatable. But there is no obvious (to me!) reason why that should be the case. EDIT: I suppose that is almost the inverse of Searle's Chinese Room argument...