Word: space
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black holes, making them invisible. Even more astounding, these bizarre non-objects are in effect celestial vacuum cleaners that voraciously devour everything they meet. They are bottomless pits into which atomic particles, dust and giant suns all disappear without a trace. They are rips in the very fabric of space and time, places where long-cherished laws of nature simply do not apply. So unbelievable and paradoxical are these notions that they have led to what Wheeler calls "the greatest crisis ever faced by physics." Says he: "Never before did we think that matter could be so ephemeral...
...surface, that seems to be a rather audacious claim. Even through the most powerful telescope, no one has seen?or ever will see?black holes. Thus, for the time being at least, these inkblots of space are mere mathematical figments. So far, they can be shown to exist only as solutions to the complex equations of general relativity?Einstein's theory of gravity?and very troubling
...with such enormous force that it literally compresses itself out of existence. The star becomes what mathematicians call a "singularity." Its matter is squeezed into an infinitesimally small volume, and it simultaneously becomes infinitely dense and has an infinitely high gravitational force. At the point of singularity, time and space no longer exist. "Imagine," says Harvard Astrophysicist Jonathan Grindlay, "you take an enormous mass and shrink it down to nothing. A very disturbing idea...
...some extent, the public's passion for black holes is part of the faddish craze for the likes of parapsychology, the occult, UFOs, thinking plants, von Daniken and other pseudoscientific hokum. Says one astrophysicist: "For some people, black holes seem to be the Bermuda Triangles of space...
...layman taxes the imagination and vocabulary of even the most articulate scientist. The matter that formed the hole has long since disappeared, like Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire cat, leaving behind only the disembodied grin of its gravity. From afar, that gravity has the same effect on objects in space as it did when its matter existed. But closer...