JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Just a very short note here, as I was doing a little work on black holes, and read the earliest recognizable scientific papers on the idea of the black hole (I almost wrote black “whole” which is an interesting concept that I guess might be sort of the same idea as a black ‘hole” if the notion existed), and thought to reproduce parts of them here.  The paper is by John Michell (mind the ‘t”!, 1724-1793, pioneering/filed creator of seismology and magnetometry, and one of the first people to competently weight the world) and exists in this long but beautifully titled work found in the Philosophical Transactions in 1784:  

[Image source: American Museum of Natural History]

 Here’s a good quote from that work:

“If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height toward it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its inertia, with o ther bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return toward it by its own proper gravity.” (Michell, Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society of London, January 1,1784.

He came up with the beautiful idea of “dark stars”, and even how to find them–it is unfortunate how (and also a function of the times) that his work would go basically unnoticed until a time when it could be better understood, but only so far as historicism is concerned.  Michell however was rescued in the 1970s at least in bibliographies, lifted from his parson’s grave of scientific anonymity.