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21 - Black holes

Gravity's one-way street

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Bernard Schutz
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Germany
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Summary

Black holes. No term evokes the mystery of modern gravity more than this one. The mystery of black holes is more than an invention of popularizers of astronomy and relativity. Black holes were certainly a mystery to Einstein and his contemporaries. Yet today black holes are everywhere: in X-ray binaries, in the centers of galaxies, and of course in books, like this one, on relativity and gravity!

In this chapter: we study general relativity's most intriguing prediction: black holes. We look at the central place they have in Einstein's theory, their role in astronomy today, and the direction they are giving to efforts to unify gravity and quantum theory. We calculate orbits around black hole, examine the astronomical evidence for black holes, and learn about wormholes, the Hawking radiation, and black hole entropy.

Theorists attacked the problem of understanding black holes, not by using astronomical evidence, but by using lessons they had learned from quantum mechanics. Quantum thinking demanded that physicists ask only questions about things that could be measured, not about what is hidden from experiment. Thus, they can measure that light behaves sometimes as a particle (the photon) and sometimes as a wave, but they find it useless to ask what is a wave–particle.

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Chapter
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Gravity from the Ground Up
An Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity
, pp. 285 - 308
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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  • Black holes
  • Bernard Schutz, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Germany
  • Book: Gravity from the Ground Up
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807800.023
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  • Black holes
  • Bernard Schutz, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Germany
  • Book: Gravity from the Ground Up
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807800.023
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Black holes
  • Bernard Schutz, Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Germany
  • Book: Gravity from the Ground Up
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807800.023
Available formats
×