Thursday, March 12, 2009

Newtonian Black Holes

Black holes, i.e., objects so dense that light cannot escape them, can exist just fine under Newton's theory of gravitation. It's a simple exercise to calculate the "event horizon", the sphere surrounding a point mass where the escape velocity is c. The answer turns out to be completely wrong. Einstein's contribution was correctly predicting their size and the nature of space and time in their vicinity.

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