Everyone can witness it in the scientifically well-researched blockbuster movie “Interstellar”: The protagonist had to travel fairly deep down to the vicinity of the surface of a giant black hole while feeling absolutely normal there. But there he realizes that when he is to come back home soon, decades will have passed by out there owing to his momentarily heavily slowed clocks and aging. Hence he is younger now than his own daughter whom he had so reluctantly left behind. This is the ingenious part of the script. The rest of the movie becomes inconsistent, the viewer realizes: The crew next goes down much deeper to reach the horizon and travel through the wormhole (and so a second time on the way back), but this time around the matching infinitely fast aging rate in the outside world is swept under the rug for the sake of the narrative having a happy end.

My point is that near the horizon itself, the slowdown becomes infinite. Hence “infinity plus infinity equals zero” is the axiom presupposed in the movie’s second part. Therefore we can dismiss that part as crab? Please, do not do so: this part describes exactly what modern physics is teaching. That is, the movie’s inconsistent second part is the current textbook knowledge: a belief in the presence of “equal rights” between the two time scales, the one outside and the one downstairs in gravity. This is the canonical teaching in physics for 75 years – ever since 1939 when J. Robert Oppenheimer unwittingly laid the ground to this logical error in his ingenious paper, written jointly with Hartland Snyder, in which the physical existence of stellar black holes was first predicted. It is highly technical (http://journals.aps.org/pr/pdf/10.1103/PhysRev.56.455 ).

Following 1939, only the “Russian school” avoided the mentioned error by speaking of “frozen stars” rather than of “stellar black holes.” Eventually, however, peer pressure from the West caused this view to fall into oblivion following the end of the cold war. The once correctly recognized “freezing of time near a black hole” was forgotten by the profession. Interstellar now brought it to the whole world.

The mentioned emotional scene (a father suffering in his heart because the imperceptible slowing-down of time that holds true for him near a mega black hole implies that his beloved young daughter will no longer be a child on his impending return) is now an eye-opener for the whole planet.

But does physics – the most difficult and most highly esteemed science on earth – really teach that the freezing of time is a mere observational effect without real-life consequences? This, Sir, is the modern gospel. The fact that, in reality, nothing ever reaches the horizon in finite outer time or else comes up from it is denied by the physics community. Now, however, the mentioned scene in the movie makes it clear to everyone endowed with a heart that the two time scales are indeed interlocked.

Does this mean that the perhaps most highly regarded profession on earth cannot think? The answer is: yes, but so only for a particular kind of reasoning. Direct – non-algorithmic – thinking has no niche left to it. Oppenheimer got blessed with the wisdom of hindsight when he said “physics has met sin” but here he hit on a perhaps even more fateful case.

Shall the scientific community go on trying to produce black holes down on earth – now that the profession has learnt from a blockbuster movie that it had believed in falsity regarding black holes for 75 years?

I plead that an almost 7 years old proposal for a “safety conference” ( http://www.wissensnavigator.com/documents/petitiontocern.pdf ) be heeded at long last – before the LHC experiment, designed to build black holes down on earth, gets re-started at twice world record energies with a multiplied chance at producing black holes in a few weeks’ time from today.

There is a good chance for a renewal of the more than six years old safety report at last after Interstellar has translated Oppenheimer’s ingenious insights into a theatrical scene that is intuitive to the eye and the heart of every viewer. After this superhuman feat accomplished by the movie-makers, every person on earth is obliged to them. I reckon it was Kip Thorne who is responsible for the miracle of a clear-sighted grief that revealed the existential dimension of gravity’s temporal effects. How does it feel, dear reader, to jointly with Kip be more intelligent than a whole profession and become a benefactor of humankind if you continue to believe in yourself? I can tell you: it feels awful since most everybody hates you – so as if belief in authority was worth dying-for even if it costs the planet. But then just look in the eyes of the young girl in the movie and you know better. This is the miracle worked by Interstellar: your own honesty towards yourself makes all the difference of the world. Even the best-educated group of people on earth is bound to concede your point if you stick to it: “Infinity plus infinity is infinity, not zero.” The correction changes the face of terrestrial black holes as well.

Imagine there existed a proof that the most reluctantly accepted feature of Einstein’s gravitation theory – that c is no longer a global but only a local constant – was unnecessary: Would that not be wonderful?

The proof was greeted with planet-wide neglect: c-global exists in the Schwarzschild metric of general relativity since 2008 and so in the more fundamental equivalence principle since 2012. It hence also holds true for the full Einstein equation – only the pertinent transform has yet be written down to enable direct unification with quantum mechanics: a holy grail.

Hence most everyone is bound to be working on this in physics? The answer is no given the embarrassment of riches that is implicit. This professional modesty is a sympathetic human trait when you look at it in a detached mood. However, the result in question has also an applied side to it. In light of the latter, a prestigious collective activity has ceased to be safe.

Such collisions of interest do usually sort themselves out spontaneously with time. Here, bad luck for once wills that the unsafe collective activity – the re-ignition of a Nobel-decorated experiment at twice its former world-record energy – has been scheduled to start in only ten weeks’ time.

Since many thousand scientists are involved, it is difficult to launch the requisite public debate within the few weeks that are left: This is an ocean-liner, not a boat. And: should the public be involved in the learned discussion about the difference between a globally constant speed of light c and a merely everywhere locally constant speed c ? I must be kidding!

But there is one point every child can ask and understand: “Does there exist a public Safety Report for the experiment in question (the “LHC” experiment at CERN)?” The answer is: “yes but”: Such an official report exists (LSAG) but it stems from early 2008 – before the safety-relevant new result was published.

This fact is known to the scientific community and to the media, but is being treated as a taboo topic. Europe – with Germany in the leading role payment-wise – thrives on the world-wide public credit granted: “They would not go ahead if they were not convinced it is safe.”

In the case of the Eniwetak catastrophe, a timely Safety Report would have been the rescue. This time around, the risk is infinitely higher due to the black-hole danger implicit in c-global.

We obviously need a public arbitration process in order to save time. There is one world-renowned public hero who has a vested interest in the LHC experiment getting started at twice world-record energy on schedule: Stephen Hawking.

I offer the world a public debate with my famous younger colleague as a substitute for the lacking safety report – to enable the experiment to proceed on time if he wins the debate.

I predict that Stephen Hawking will accept the offer as a bet because he is a sportsman. And because his courage spares CERN the trouble of having to renew its safety report in the short time span left before the scheduled start. A positive response will be a Christmas present to all.

CERN bets the planet on the early Einstein having been wrong. Let me explain.

After having founded special relativity in mid-1905, the early Einstein held fast to the speed of light c being a global constant of nature for another 2 ½ years. Only in December of 1907 did Einstein switch to the view that c was only an everywhere locally, but not globally, valid constant of nature.

In 2008, results proving that the early Einstein of 1905 was right started to appear in the scientific literature. For example, quantum electrodynamics combined with the equivalence principle (Schwinger) shows this. Up until now, no counterproof is in the literature.

In light of this renaissance of the early Einstein, a previously noncontroversial policy of the famous CERN consortium turns out to be problematical: their refusal to update the outdated Safety Report of mid-2008. Demanding this update has become a priority issue for everyone who learns about its lack.

The return after a century to the global constancy of c of the early Einstein implies that man-made black holes – which CERN tries to produce in its soon to be re-started particle collider – are different: They are undetectable to CERN’s detectors. This fact renders the experiment strictly speaking unscientific. Most important, however: if but one specimen of the invisible hoped-for objects is slow enough not to fly away into outer space, it is going to grow exponentially inside earth to turn the planet into a 2-cm black hole after a silent period of a few years in accordance with the laws of exponential growth.

As long as CERN is unable to publicly contradict this scenario in an update of its famous 6 years old Safety Report, they cannot re-start the Large Hadron Collider on logical grounds.

It all boils down to the question: “Who of the two Einsteins – the early one or the 2 ½ years older one – was right?”

(For J.O.R.)

It is a nice game: Pretend that c, the speed of light in the vacuum, were a global constant of nature. Then the Einstein equation assumes a more compact form. And black holes acquire radically new properties. One should not try to produce them down on earth, for example.

Fortunately, this simple game is pure fiction. Presently, Stephen Hawking’s safety guarantee to the planet – the rapid “evaporation” he described – renders miniature black holes innocuous, his recent modifications notwithstanding.

There are some voices that c is indeed globally constant (http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/2608/2469 ). Would this be a reason to look at the issue anew for Hawking and others?

To elder children and young adults, it is a bonanza since everything becomes transparent. The “ugly” dependency of the speed of light on the local pull of gravity – that it is slowed in the vicinity of the sun (Shapiro) and comes to a standstill at the horizon of a black hole (Oppenheiumer) – is gone since the distances travelled are proportionally enlarged. Simultaneously, the so far assumed to be added-on expansion speed of the universe ceases to be an option so that the “Big Bang” is no longer a physical reality. A new freedom – a vast new spatial reality to roam – opened itself up.

The same liberation has almost the opposite effect on slightly older young people – those who have to pass an exam or defend a thesis in a physical discipline. They are at a loss as to what still to believe and defend. Most textbooks have become obsolete. How discuss the new situation with Stephen Hawking, for example, or with CERN? Most importantly: How reconcile it with Einstein’s own work?

The latter job is a joy. A renaissance of the young Einstein – of the three years of his miraculous period ranging from 1905 until late 1907 – follows. These years were fueled by the universal constancy of the speed of light c in the vacuum as is well known.

What about the famous “Einstein equation” of late 1915, however: Has it become obsolete since its c is not a global but only a local constant? The equation only needs a re-scaling. The “too short” spatial distances for the elongated light travelling times just get proportionally stretched. The “Shapiro time delay” is now accompanied by a space dilation (“Shapiro-Cook space dilation”) and the infinite temporal distance to the horizon of a black hole is accompanied by an equally infinite spatial distance valid from outside.

The oldest and most important solution to the Einstein equation – the Schwarzschild metric – exists already in a correct stretched-out version. Only the full Einstein equation itself still waits to be written down explicitly in the correct form by a daring newcomer. Alternatively, Roy Kerr – author of the famous “Kerr metric” for a rotating black hole – may be willing to to accomplish the re-writing task for the Einstein equation which will then reveal a whole new physics.

Does the successful repair of a flaw that had gone undetected for a century (• really need to be called a “catastrophe”? The opposite is the case. One sobering consequence also follows, however: When even the “hardest science” – physics – could go awry for a whole century, a new humility is called for in physics. The strongest young generation of history is now at the ready aided by the no longer distant young Einstein.

Acknowledgment: I thank the three Universities of the Normandy for the undeserved honor bestowed in Le Havre on my chaos work done in the footsteps of Jim Yorke who, together with Celso Grebogi and Ron Chen, was most deservedly honored there. For J.O.R.

(• http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/article/view/2608/2469

My repair of the global constancy of the speed of light c – the loss of which had stopped Einstein from publishing on gravitation for 4 years – has revived Einstein’s early greatest strength.

If c is globally constant, black holes are radically different – nonevaporating – in contradistinction to Hawking. And the by definition superluminal expansion speed of the “Big Bang” is likewise exploded.

Two canonized postulates gone: So it is no wonder that CERN refuses to defend its six years old safety report?

Suppose the young Einstein was indeed stronger: Would it not be worthy to check on this fact, especially so if it could save the planet from a catastrophe?

The world needs a voice capable of defending the older Einstein against the younger one. Anyone able to hit that goal?