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> ...there was one person who showed remarkable prescience about black holes... > According to McCormmach, the existence of invisible stars was a relatively co
by 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,
- Syonyk 2y agoBut stranger still is Lost Carcosa.
- gumby 2y ago> Talk about burying the lede. Also there was too much discussion of his background before getting around to the topic at hand. A little detail might have been interesting, but it felt padded out.
- tootie 2y agoBurying the lede is when your headline isn't the most important bit of information. When the headline is completely inaccurate, it's called clickbait.
- Angostura 2y agoI think you are making an error here. The article says there was much talk about invisible stars. There are many reasons that a star could be invisible. So it's not the same as saying there was much talk about stars that were so massive that their own light was swallowed back up.
- JoelMcCracken 2y agoI don't know, isn't Aristotle credited with "predicting" the theory of the atom? Is this not an equivalent situation, in principle? According to the article, it seems that his contribution was calculating a body size/density which would, according to newtonian physics, disallow light from escaping its gravity. So while the idea of a dark star existed at the time, the especially prescient part was connecting this to gravity. It would have been truly extraordinary if Michell had predicted _all_ of the relevant properties of black holes.