Comment Extremely poor article on black holes (Score 1) 108
When an essay or article has statements ike this:
A black hole is therefore a region of space that is totally, utterly dominated by the force of gravity.
It's clear the author knows little to nothing about physics. The physics _inside_ a black hole is local and can be quite normal: there's no reason to think it's _not_ normal physics. The definition of black holes involves the net effect of gravitation _outside_ the black hole, with a net escape velocity greater than C. Normal physics inside a black hole itself is critical to the "cyclic" models of the universe, where the gravitational mass is sufficient to draw the mass of the closed universe back and initiate a new "Big Bang". According to this model, the universe itself is one large black hole which we live inside. That's quite difficult if we're in a region of space that is "totally, utterly dominated by the force of gravity".
Some of the theoretical difficulty and potential for weird physics comes in observing the internal physics from outside the black hole. There's potential for a distinct set of physical laws, because it's effectively isolated and we can't observe the inside from the outside. But even those physical laws seem to obey angular momentum and charge, which can be be observed from outside the black hole itself much as the black hole's net gravity can be observed from outside.
Finally, there is no compelling reason to believe that there is _ever_ such an object as a completely spherical, detectable black hole, which is what this poorly researched article keeps talking about. Extremely small black holes, formed by possibly electrically neutral and non-spinning compressed objects, effectively evaporate extremely quickly for reasons described by Stephen Hawking described decades ago. Such an object might be spin neutral and electrically neutral, but would evaporate too quickly to be observed well at galactic distances. It's difficult to imagine there is any circumstance in which a larger black hole would have no spin whatsoever, and a spinning black hole is _not_ spherical. The earliest models of black holes described spinning black holes, including the work by Kerr, Penrose, and Hawking. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.1019)
It would be understandable to leave out such details in a shorter essay that didn't make such absolute claims. But no competent science editor would have ever let this be printed in any science magazine above the 1st grade level: the proliferation of bad chemistry, physics, and biology of such badly written content is a disheartening effect of modern web publishing.