Dear Dr. Narayan,

Thankyou for forwarding the paper by yourself and others on the advection process in BH and NS accretion systems.

I am in fact a promoter of Ritzian theory, an alternative to GR and SR. I have an honours degree in physics and have had some exposure to GR and tensors. It was Steve Carlip on the sci.physics.relativity who directed me to your paper as one which demonstrated the reality of event horizons as a part of black holes.

I have concentrated on Ritzian theory as applied to electromagnetism, but have nevertheless done my best to explain observations presently explained by GR as well. Challenges by other people on the newsgroup led me to develop this alternate approach.

I am, therefore, a dissident. I ask that you consider and reply to my thoughts as long as they are reasonable and considered. If you don't consider them that way, I guess that's my problem. I would be equally happy with a reply by one of your co-authors as yourself.

It would appear your analysis demonstrates that there is a boundary on objects normally called black holes, where energy does not escape from this boundary. This means that the energy released from a neutron star accretion system is larger than that for a black hole accretion system, other things being equal.

However, this is not necessarily evidence for an event horizon, singularity and all the things which come with GR. It is evidence for a "gravitational radiation trap". The rest is interpretation.

The Ritzian analogue for a black hole is what I have called a Ritzian Dark Object, and I understand such things as dark stars were hypothesised way back when.

According to this hypothesis, light can be affected by gravity without the normal GR baggage about warped spacetime, and a strong enough gravitational field can stop light from escaping. A dense enough object does not collapse into a singularity under this gravitational field because strong enough pressure on a particle actually reduces the gravitational field, prompting the formation of an equilibrium where the "corrected density" is quite close to 10^15 g/cm^3 throughout, except for a surface layer.

Such an object is a "physical" object in contrast to a black hole, but will gobble up light and not let it escape.

Over time, such an object may develop a visible surface if it collects more energy than mass, and the surface layer becomes energetic and thick enough to bring itself outside the Ritzian analogue of the Schwarzchild radius. However, in isolation such an object will be at thermal equilibrium with the space around it, and be a small scattering object and effectively invisible.

Such an RDO could account for all of the observed properties of accreting BH systems, including those featured in the paper you forwarded to me.

Of course, an accreting RDO might gather together enough energy to make the surface visible, and we would then have a very massive object with the accretion properties of a NS. While such an object would be a consequence of the hypothesis, it could be that such objects are quite rare, or that the typical mass input via an accretion disk does not have sufficient energy for this to occur.

The missing parts of this approach are of course the mathematics of the energy into and out of the RDO. If the energy contained in the light emitted is significantly different to the Newtonian model, then Ritzian theory would have to accomodate the same changes. A question also arises as to how critically dependent the characteristics of an accretion disk are on GR, and to what degree they might be explained according to conventional gravity.

Also, the mathematics of the bending of light by Ritzian theory needs to be worked out. You may be aware that an approach by O'Rahilly comes up with a light bending angle of 3/4 of the observed. However, this approach does not make use of higher order terms in the Ritzian formula. Certainly, an obstacle, and one I need to overcome.

The change in energy of photons coming out of a gravitational well is explained by GR, but might explained by other gravitational theories through a generalised appeal to conservation of energy.

Certainly, there is all the _other_ stuff explained by GR, which Steve Carlip has pointed out to me. I do not deny its existence, but note that the most I can do is take one thing at a time, and that I now limit myself to alternate explanations for the observations normally explained through appeal to GR and black holes.

What are your thoughts ? It seems to me on reading your paper that the results are dependent on ideas of energy lost in falling into a gravitational well, but that these ideas are not critically dependent on GR.

Sure, I'm lacking a lot of maths at the moment, but am just fleshing out my ideas.

Regards,