‘A Crack in Everything’: A Fascinating Look at Black Holes

The new book’s subtitle explains it well: ‘How Black Holes Came in From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage.’

How new technologies broadened our knowledge of space, especially of black holes.

In November 1915, a German officer on leave attended a lecture on relativity given by Albert Einstein. Before joining the Kaiser’s army, that officer, Karl Schwarzschild, was the director of the prestigious Berlin Observatory. Schwarzschild developed an exact solution for Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He sent it to Einstein, who credited Schwarzschild with achieving what Einstein had failed to do.

Schwarzschild realized something else. His equations meant if you compressed a star enough, its gravity would create a bottomless pit from which nothing could escape, even light. It would wink out of existence.

Black Holes and Major Implications

This book follows the implications and consequences of Schwarzschild’s discovery. Initially, it was disbelieved and dismissed as a mathematical artifact. Einstein dismissed it as something impossible in the real world. Over the next 50 years, evidence accumulated that Schwarzschild’s anomaly actually existed.