# Does the mass of black holes prove that there is no singularity inside?

To explain my question: a) we know that black holes have mass, it's the one thing that we know about them that has been observed and measured and not just theorized. b) we know from particle physics that to acquire mass, the object needs to have some particles that interact with the Higgs field, like quarks and bosons.

While these boson particles are very small, their size is greater than zero, 10^-16cm or something in that range. A singularity theoretically has a size of zero, infinite density. Doesnt the mass of black holes prove that singularities are nonsense? Black holes have mass, they interact with Higgs particles, so they must have some fundamental particles inside, a quark-gluon plasma soup perhaps, very very dense but not infinitely so?

• The mass of a black hole is a measure of how much space-time is curved in the vicinity. It should not be considered to reside inside the SR of the black hole. Hence the existence of BH mass implies nothing about the nature of the singularity. On the other hand singularity is a mathematical concept. Who knows what nature does. Inside a BH. – Lewis Miller Mar 26 '17 at 16:26
• @LewisMiller " Mass should not be considered to reside inside the SR of the black hole." It was my impression that supermassive black holes are called that because they are literally massive, as in full of mass? What else could be curving the spacetime if it has no mass? Are there any experiments that show that massless particles like photons and gluons can also curve spacetime? – Andy S Mar 26 '17 at 17:00

But even leaving this aside the concept of mass for a black hole is more subtle than you might think. The archetypal black hole, the Schwarzschild metric, is a vacuum solution i.e. the mass density is zero everywhere except at the singularity where it is undefined. A Schwarzschild black hole does not have a point mass at the centre. In fact technically it does not have a centre at all since we traditionally consider the singularity not to be part of the spacetime manifold. The mass $M$ that we use in the description of the Schwarzschild black hole is a property called the ADM mass that is actually a geometrical property.