In a special illustrated feature, Ben Platts-Mills explains why Albert Einstein and other physicists refused to believe black holes could be real. Were they too strange to imagine?
In a special illustrated feature, Ben Platts-Mills explains why Albert Einstein and other eminent physicists refused to believe black holes could be real.
Overcome by their own gravity, they collapse beyond any sustainable condition of matter to form a sudden, exponential crunch: an implosion so absolute that it punctures spacetime and unstrings in its vicinity everything we know as physics.
While some scientists had speculated about the existence of similar objects called “dark stars” more than 200 years ago, it was Einstein’s theory of general relativity that laid the ground for understanding how black holes could be created.
Its gravitation would become ever more powerful as it insatiably devoured surrounding masses until, finally, it reached the point of “singularity”, a moment where the laws of physics break down, and time and space cease to exist.
In the same lecture, Chandrasekhar quoted the physicist Werner Heisenberg talking to Einstein about the experience of scientific revelation: “You must have felt it too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.”
The story’s narrator mentions that the local Norwegians “almost universally entertained” the notion “that in the centre of the channel of the Maelström is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part”.
The original article contains 3,343 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a special illustrated feature, Ben Platts-Mills explains why Albert Einstein and other eminent physicists refused to believe black holes could be real.
Overcome by their own gravity, they collapse beyond any sustainable condition of matter to form a sudden, exponential crunch: an implosion so absolute that it punctures spacetime and unstrings in its vicinity everything we know as physics.
While some scientists had speculated about the existence of similar objects called “dark stars” more than 200 years ago, it was Einstein’s theory of general relativity that laid the ground for understanding how black holes could be created.
Its gravitation would become ever more powerful as it insatiably devoured surrounding masses until, finally, it reached the point of “singularity”, a moment where the laws of physics break down, and time and space cease to exist.
In the same lecture, Chandrasekhar quoted the physicist Werner Heisenberg talking to Einstein about the experience of scientific revelation: “You must have felt it too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared.”
The story’s narrator mentions that the local Norwegians “almost universally entertained” the notion “that in the centre of the channel of the Maelström is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part”.
The original article contains 3,343 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 93%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!