The scientist who thought up black holes – 241 years ago

By Ross Pomeroy 
Real Clear Science

Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Robert Oppenheimer, Karl Schwarzschild, John Wheeler, Albert Einstein, Leonard Susskind – these renowned scientists all, in one way or another, helped black holes transition from the theoretical realm to the real world. Today we can say with evidential backing that these gravitational behemoths, so dense that not even light can escape their pull, likely number in the quintillions. 

But just over 240 years ago, their very existence was considered strange and unacceptable. Well before many of the world's aforementioned scientific heroes were inescapably entranced by black holes, an unheralded thinker reasoned them into reality from contemporary scientific knowledge.

John Michell, an English natural philosopher, delved into astronomy, geology, optics, and gravitation in the mid-18th century, uncovering precious insights that earned him election in 1760 to the famed Royal Society, still today the world's leading scientific academy. Yet despite his many contributions, Michell is little known in the annals of scientific history, partly because he did little to popularize himself or his ideas.

English historian of scientist E. T. Whittaker noted that despite Michell being "the only natural philosopher of distinction who lived and taught at Cambridge" for many years after the death of Isaac Newton, his "researches seem to have attracted little or no attention among his collegiate contemporaries and successors, who silently acquiesced when his discoveries were attributed to others, and allowed his name to perish entirely from Cambridge tradition."

One of those "researches" originated in 1783, born from Michell's realization that particles of light theorized by Newton emerging from the surface of a star would have their speed reduced by the star’s gravitational pull, just like any object on Earth flung skyward. He then took this thought experiment to the extreme, reasoning that a massive-enough star could have gravity so strong that particles of light could not escape, thus rendering the star invisible to an outside observer.

Michell was a talented constructor of telescopes. At times, he doubtlessly gazed through his creations at the dark gaps between the twinkling stars above, wondering if he might be scanning across any of his hypothesized stellar ghosts. He figured that with more powerful telescopes, astronomers from Earth might be able to infer the presence of his massive, dark stars by observing luminous stars orbiting around spots seemingly with nothing there. Centuries later, this is one method astronomers utilize to 'see' black holes.

Michell's conception of black holes wouldn't receive serious consideration from the broader scientific community until physicists began probing the ramifications of Einstein's general relativity in the early 20th century. The term "black hole" didn't even arise until 1967.

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