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A British clergyman who predicted black holes in 1783
- tocs3 2y agoMakes me think of Charles Babage and Ada Lovelace. I do not think either got much recognition until relatively recently.
- chuckadams 2y agoThey're hardly obscure: I was learning CS back when rocks were soft and Babbage was a well-known historical figure. And Ada Lovelace has a language named after her. Konrad Zuse on the other hand ... not so many props thrown his way -- for obvious reasons, given the timing, but that doesn't have to continue.
- TheAmazingRace 2y agoKonrad at least got to live to see the evolution of computers up to the micro-computing era, as he died in the mid 90s. I bet he had to have been blown away by the rapid progress since WWII. One of his later systems was even proven to be Turing-complete! Pretty impressive for someone having absolutely no knowledge of what was happening elsewhere, like at Bletchley Park...
- shombaboor 2y agodoes anyone else remember babbage's the store? That's how I became aware of who he was
- jeremyjh 2y agoOh sure. Hadn't thought about them in a long time. But yes I'd say Babagge was quite well known due to that. With Ada, I was a little older before I'd heard of her, but I definitely had heard about her even before studying computer science.
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- 29athrowaway 2y agoThe more mass, the more gravity. The more gravity, the larger the escape velocity. But there's a maximum speed in the universe, the speed of light. If a body has so much mass that the escape velocity is higher than the speed of light, you got a black hole.
- jmdeon 2y agoBut escape velocity refers to objects with mass, which light is without. Really its more about bending spacetime so much that light among all else gets trapped in a well of it.
- 29athrowaway 2y agoI was trying to come up with a 1700s-like explanation.
- mathgradthrow 2y agoescape velocity does not explicitly refer to an object with mass. One of the earliest observations about gravity is that the acceleration that results is independent of the mass of the falling object. This is why it is called escape velocity instead of escape momentum.
- moi2388 2y agoTechnically that’s not certain yet, we just know it’s very small. There are still experiments setting upper bounds. Technically..
- DoctorOetker 2y agolight has no rest mass, and how often have you seen a photon at rest?
- LorenPechtel 2y agoLight is subject to escape velocity the same as matter is. A black hole is just as black in a Newtonian universe as an Einsteinian one. Without an understanding of the warping of spacetime he had no idea of the truly one-way nature of a black hole, but he was right about light not being able to make it out. It's an approximation but a pretty good one.
- digging 2y ago> ...there was one person who showed remarkable prescience about black holes... > According to McCormmach, the existence of invisible stars was a relatively common idea among scientists of the time. Talk about burying the lede. The life and times of Michell seem irrelevant here, when in fact many were calculating the idea of stars so heavy they would recapture their own light. And they were calculating this based on an incorrect principle of light-as-massive-particles. And these dark stars did not behave at all as black holes do according to modern theories. So, black holes were not in fact predicted by British clergyman John Michell. This could have been an interesting article if it hadn't tried to force its deceptive headline.
- pmontra 2y agoThey were not holes in spacetime but they were dark and had the same massive gravitational field black holes have.
- digging 2y agoBeing dark is also a property of planets, and these dark stars did not have the same massive gravitational field black holes have, in that they were supposed to be able to shed light on nearby planets. So they had very little in common with actual black holes, mechanically, including not being holes in spacetime (which is what makes black holes such an interesting problem). And, again, they also operated in a completely different way by attracting the mass of photons, which doesn't exist, rather than bending spacetime. I'm not saying there aren't similarities, but this ancient idea of invisible stars is a relatively simple thought experiment that only hints in the direction of black holes. For the most part, all the important properties of black holes were not predicted.
- Apocryphon 2y agoStrange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies,
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- IIAOPSW 2y agoSure, and the ancient Greeks predicted the heat death of the universe. The premise that all matter has an intrinsic type, and that all types tend to either float or sink relative to the others, and that in the long run all matter will be organized into perfect spheres of homogeneous layers, is totally in line with our modern understanding of entropy. Every old theory was sort of right if you just ignore all the ways it was wrong and interpret it very liberally.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y agoRight, just like Democritus "predicted" atoms.
- pcwalton 2y agoWell, Democritus' theory of matter was closer to the truth than that of Aristotle, despite both being substantially wrong. Perhaps science would have progressed faster if Democritus' ideas had persisted up to the Renaissance instead of Aristotle's. That's all you can really say: ancient Greek philosophy in no way resembled modern science, but that doesn't mean that we can't give the ones who got closer than others any credit.
- eru 2y agoSome of the Greeks were a lot better than others. Aristotle's work for example was mostly trash, but Archimedes did work that still holds up. I guess Archimedes was much closer to a craftsman, and Aristotle was more of what we'd call a liberal arts scholar. Reality puts a check on the flights of fancy of the craftsman. See also the work of whoever build the Antikythera mechanism.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y agoScience is a process, a methodology. It's not a collection of truthful fact. Some got closer by accident, not because they had the right methodology. Because of that I award them no points.