Get the latest tech news

Einstein and his peers were resistant to black holes

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?

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."

Get the Android app