A paper has been recently posted to arXiv by Fromholz, Poisson, and Will (http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0394). In their paper titled “The Schwarzschild metric: It’s the coordinates, stupid!” the Authors consider the so-called ‘Schwarzschild solution’ for “a vacuum, static spherical spacetime” and attempt to determine a general means by which equivalent solutions can be generated.
They have however, failed to obtain this means, deriving instead by their methods only one already
known equivalent form, which has no physical significance. Their paper is without any scientific merit.
The full downloadable PDF, ‘On The ‘Stupid’ Paper by Fromholz, Poisson and Will,’ may be located at viXra.org where, over 19 pages, Stephen J Crothers addresses the false arguments for the black hole adduced by Fromholz, Poisson, and Will. Mathematics is employed. Version [2] corrects some typographical anomalies.
Here are selected extracts:
What these Authors don’t realise is that even if it is assumed, as they do, that linearization of Einstein’s field equations is admissible (which they have not proven or even addressed), the “simple wave equation” they refer to is in fact coordinate dependent. Consequently the speed of propagation of the ‘gravitational waves’ they allude to is coordinate dependent. In other words, the speed of propagation of Einstein’s gravitational waves can be given any speed one likes, by a simple change of coordinates. Einstein merely wished his gravitational waves to propagate at speed c (light in vacuum) and so he deliberately chose a set of coordinates to make it so. The wave equation obtained from the linearised field equations is not unique at all.
The speed of propagation of Einstein’s gravitational waves is not deduced from Einstein’s linearised form of his field equations; it is set by hypothesis and a set of coordinates deliberately chosen to satisfy the hypothesis.