Landmarks:
Forgotten Black Hole Birth
By David Lindley
(This story was originally published by Physical
Review Focus on May 28.)
[The American Physical Society, the oldest society of physicists in
the US, has put online the entire archive-- back to 1893-- of its flagship
journal, Physical Review. Abstracts by Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi,
and other famous physicists can be seen on the site. "Landmarks" features
important papers from the archive.]
Had J. Robert Oppenheimer not led the U.S. effort to build the atomic
bomb, he might still have been remembered for conceiving of black holes.
His 1939 Physical Review paper, written with graduate student Hartland
Snyder, described how a star might collapse into an object so dense that
not even light could escape its gravitational clutches. The paper was
hardly noticed until the 1960s, when astrophysicists began to seriously
consider that such extreme objects might exist. John Wheeler of Princeton
University then came up with the name "black holes" for these
now standard elements of astrophysics.
(J. R. Oppenheimer and H. Snyder, Phys. Rev. 56, 455 (1939))
Copyright 2004, The American Physical Society
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