h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Quote " We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one new delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
…Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." -– Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852

Rudy Schild at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, spotted what they claim to be the death knell for black hole -"..astronomers' view of a universe liberally sprinkled with invisible, all-consuming black holes should be replaced with an alternative that sees strange, magnetic balls of plasma floating in their place." (Guardian, July 29)

If we go back to the origins of the Black Hole THEORY - "..there was a legitimate debate over whether black holes existed or not." (Prof Gerry Gilmore at Cambridge University's Institute for Astronomy). So why was gravity chosen as the only possible force available within the Universe? What's wrong with incorporating the hugely more powerful electromagnetic forces that pervade outer space?

A ball of plasma generates magnetic fields (and wide range em radiation) however it needs an electric field to form!

I think what makes gravity the most likely of the big four forces are a few reasons:
1) there are trillions of starts, and a good fraction are of the critical mass needed to theoretically shrink into a black hole. So this makes it more likely
2) we understand little about gravity. In all this debate about the extreme cases, we learn stuff.

You say: 'we understand little about gravity'
But do 'we learn stuff'?
Why do astroscientists use (mechanical) gravity as the only means of explaining the universe when we don't understand it? Black holes feed on gravity ONLY. We probably know more about electricity and certainly can reproduce lab experiments to demonstrate what we see in space. Plasma discharge scientists can virtually create a galaxy in the lab from cm sparks, then scale it up to billions of volts and light years. Plasma is totally scalable.

Gravity depends on the particles that make up our mass. It's convenient to describe planetary motions but little else. It doesn't explain the x-rays and radio emissions that originate from plasma discharge sources.

http://www.electric-cosmos.org/galaxies.htm

Its quite an interesting question 'Black holes a delusion?'
i have an interesting fact - quasars spew out matter whilst black holes suck the matter in.

but has anyone thought of this - could black holes (which suck in matter) and quasars (which spew out matter (from where??)) have a wormhole between them which would explain where the matter goes?

i have read things that say 'A quasar is powered by the central supermassive black hole, which lies at their centre' - but that doesnt mean anything. that is saying that the matter that the black hole sucks in comes from the quasar.