2 ms·

In 1700s?

• tzs 3y ago
  Yup. Those in the 1700s who wrote about stars with so much mass that light cannot escape would have known that their calculations only applied to ballistic trajectories. They would have believed that non-ballistic objects such as rockets would be able to escape because all they had was Newtonian physics. That when mass becomes high enough that light can't escape nothing else can escape either doesn't pop out of the math until you have general relativity.