by Jeremy Bernstein
G reat science sometimes produces a legacy that outstrips not only the
imagination of its practitioners but also their intentions. A case in point
is the early development of the theory of black holes and, above all, the
role played in it by Albert Einstein. In 1939 Einstein published a paper in the jour-
nal Annals of Mathematics with the daunting title On a Stationary System with
Spherical Symmetry Consisting of Many Gravitating Masses. With it, Einstein
sought to prove that black holescelestial objects so dense that their gravity pre-
vents even light from escapingwere impossible.
The irony is that, to make his case, he used his own general theory of relativity
and gravitation, published in 1916the very theory that is now used to argue that
black holes are not only possible but, for many astronomical objects, inevitable.
Indeed, a few months after Einsteins rejection of black holes appearedand with
no reference to itJ. Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland S. Snyder
published a paper entitled On Continued Gravitational Contraction. That work
used Einsteins general theory of relativity to show, for the first time in the context
of modern physics, how black holes could form.
WOBBLY
PATH
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS EMILIO SEGR VISUAL ARCHIVE
SIRIUS
WHITE
DWARF
JARED SCHNEIDMAN DESIGN
BETTMANN ARCHIVE
UPI/BETTMANN
82 Scientific American June 1996 Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc. The Reluctant Father of Black Holes
ing from Madras to Southampton. He turbed Eddington. What described gravity around
had been accepted by the British physi- happens if the mass is more To Eddington, matter was extremely com-
cist R. H. Fowler to study with him at
the University of Cambridge (where Ed-
than 1.4 times that of the
sun? He was not pleased white dwarfs plicated, because gravity dis-
torts the geometry of space
dington was, too). Having read Edding- with the answer. Unless were an and time, causing a particle
tons book on the stars and Fowlers some mechanism could be affront. to move from point to point
book on quantum-statistical mechanics, found for limiting the mass along a curved path. More
Chandrasekhar had become fascinated of any star that was even- important to Einstein, the
by white dwarfs. To pass the time during tually going to compress itself into a source of gravitymattercould not be
the voyage, Chandrasekhar asked him- dwarf, or unless Chandrasekhars result described by the gravitational equations
self: Is there any upper limit to how mas- was wrong, massive stars were fated to alone. It had to be put in by hand, leav-
sive a white dwarf can be before it col- collapse gravitationally into oblivion. ing Einstein to feel the equations were
lapses under the force of its own gravi- Eddington found this intolerable and incomplete. Still, approximate solutions
tation? His answer set off a revolution. proceeded to attack Chandrasekhars could describe with sufficient accuracy
A white dwarf as a whole is electri- use of quantum statisticsboth publicly phenomena such as the bending of star-
cally neutral, so all the electrons must and privately. The criticism devastated light. Nevertheless, he was impressed
have a corresponding proton, which is Chandrasekhar. But he held his ground, when, in 1916, the German astronomer
some 2,000 times more massive. Con- bolstered by people such as the Danish Karl Schwarzschild came up with an
sequently, protons must supply the bulk physicist Niels Bohr, who assured him exact solution for a realistic situation
of the gravitational compression. If the that Eddington was simply wrong and in particular, the case of a planet orbit-
dwarf is not collapsing, the degeneracy should be ignored. ing a star.
pressure of the electrons and the gravi- In the process, Schwarzschild found
tational collapse of the protons must A Singular Sensation something disturbing. There is a distance
just balance. This balance, it turns out, from the center of the star at which the
limits the number of protons and hence
the mass of the dwarf. This maximum
is known as the Chandrasekhar limit
A s researchers explored quantum sta- mathematics goes berserk. At this dis-
tistics and white dwarfs, others tance, now known as the Schwarzschild
tackled Einsteins work on gravitation, radius, time vanishes, and space be-
and equals about 1.4 times the mass of his general theory of relativity. As far as comes infinite. The equation becomes
the sun. Any dwarf more massive than I know, Einstein never spent a great deal what mathematicians call singular. The
this number cannot be stable. of time looking for exact solutions to Schwarzschild radius is usually much
Chandrasekhars result deeply dis- his gravitational equations. The part that smaller than the radius of the object. For
AIP EMILIO SEGR VISUAL ARCHIVE
UPI/BETTMANN
UPI/BETTMANN
1926 1930
Enrico Fermi and P.A.M. Dirac develop quantum statistics for particles Using quantum statistics and Eddingtons work
that obey Paulis exclusion principle (such as electrons and protons). on stars, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar finds
When compressed, such particles fly away from one another, creating that the upper mass limit for white dwarfs
a so-called degeneracy pressure. is 1.4 times the mass of the sun, suggesting
that more massive stars collapse into oblivion.
Eddington makes fun of him.
The Reluctant Father of Black Holes Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc. Scientific American June 1996 83
the sun, for example, it is three kilome- mann, who is now professor emeritus fact that the then 60-year-old Einstein
ters, whereas for a one-gram marble it at Syracuse University. It was certainly presents in this paper tables of numeri-
is 10 28 centimeter. Einsteins intention in this paper to kill cal results, which he must have gotten by
Schwarzschild was, of course, aware off the Schwarzschild singularity once using a slide rule. But the paper, like the
that his formula went crazy at this ra- and for all. At the end of it he writes, slide rule, is now a historical artifact.
dius, but he decided that it did not mat- The essential result of this investiga-
ter. He constructed a simplified model tion is a clear understanding as to why From Neutrons to Black Holes
of a star and showed that it would take Schwarzschild singularities do not ex-
an infinite gradient of pressure to com-
press it to his radius. The finding, he ar-
gued, served no practical interest.
ist in physical reality. In other words,
black holes cannot exist.
To make his point, Einstein focused
W hile Einstein was doing this re-
search, an entirely different en-
terprise was unfolding in California. Op-
But his analysis did not appease ev- on a collection of small particles moving penheimer and his students were creat-
erybody. It bothered Einstein, because in circular orbits under the influence of ing the modern theory of black holes
Schwarzschilds model star did not sat- one anothers gravitationin effect, a [see J. Robert Oppenheimer: Before
isfy certain technical requirements of system resembling a spherical star clus- the War, by John S. Rigden; Scientif-
relativity theory. Various people, how- ter. He then asked whether such a con- ic American, July 1995]. The curious
ever, showed that one could rewrite figuration could collapse under its own thing about the black-hole research is
Schwarzschilds solutions so that they gravity into a stable star with a radius that it was inspired by an idea that
avoided the singularity. But was the re- equal to its Schwarzschild radius. He turned out to be entirely wrong. In 1932
sult really nonsingular? It would be in- concluded that it could not, because at the British experimental physicist James
correct to say that a debate raged, be- a somewhat larger radius the stars in Chadwick found the neutron, the neu-
cause most physicists had rather little the cluster would have to move faster tral component of the atomic nucleus.
regard for these mattersat least until than light in order to keep the configu- Soon thereafter speculation beganmost
1939. ration stable. Although Einsteins rea- notably by Fritz Zwicky of the Califor-
In his 1939 paper Einstein credits his soning is correct, his point is irrelevant: nia Institute of Technology and inde-
renewed concern about the Schwarz- it does not matter that a collapsing star pendently by the brilliant Soviet theo-
schild radius to discussions with the at the Schwarzschild radius is unstable, retical physicist Lev D. Landauthat
Princeton cosmologist Harold P. Robert- because the star collapses past that ra- neutrons could lead to an alternative to
son and with his assistant Peter G. Berg- dius anyway. I was much taken by the white dwarfs.
UPI/BETTMANN
84 Scientific American June 1996 Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc. The Reluctant Father of Black Holes
When the gravitational
pressure got large enough,
Although concurrently, 3,000 miles
awaywas of no relevance.
an infinite amount of time for the star
to collapse to its Schwarzschild radius.
they argued, an electron in Einsteins But Oppenheimer did not What happens after that we cannot say,
a star could react with a reasoning want to construct a stable because, according to the stationary ob-
proton to produce a neu- star with a radius equal to server, there is no after. As far as this
tron. (Zwicky even conjec- was correct, its Schwarzschild radius. observer is concerned, the star is frozen
tured that this process his point is He wanted to see what at its Schwarzschild radius.
would happen in superno- would happen if one let the Indeed, until December 1967, when
va explosions; he was right,
irrelevant. star collapse through its the physicist John A. Wheeler, now at
and these neutron stars Schwarzschild radius. He Princeton University, coined the name
we now identify as pulsars.) At the time suggested that Snyder work out this black hole in a lecture he presented,
of this work, the actual mechanism for problem in detail. these objects were often referred to in
generating the energy in ordinary stars To simplify matters, Oppenheimer told the literature as frozen stars. This fro-
was not known. One solution placed a Snyder to make certain assumptions zen state is the real significance of the
neutron star at the center of ordinary and to neglect technical considerations singularity in the Schwarzschild geome-
stars, in somewhat the same spirit that such as the degeneracy pressure or the try. As Oppenheimer and Snyder ob-
many astrophysicists now conjecture possible rotation of the star. Oppen- served in their paper, the collapsing star
that black holes power quasars. heimers intuition told him that these tends to close itself off from any com-
The question then arose: What was factors would not change anything es- munication with a distant observer; only
the equivalent of the Chandrasekhar sential. (These assumptions were chal- its gravitational field persists. In other
mass limit for these stars? Determining lenged many years later by a new gen- words, a black hole has been formed.
this answer is much harder than finding eration of researchers using sophisticat- But what about observers riding with
the limit for the white dwarfs. The rea- ed high-speed computerspoor Snyder collapsing stars? These observers, Op-
son is that the neutrons interact with had an old-fashioned mechanical desk penheimer and Snyder pointed out, have
one another with a strong force whose calculatorbut Oppenheimer was right. a completely different sense of things.
specifics we still do not fully understand. Nothing essential changes.) With the To them, the Schwarzschild radius has
Gravity will eventually overcome this simplified assumptions, Snyder found no special significance. They pass right
force, but the precise limiting mass is out that what happens to a collapsing through it and on to the center in a mat-
sensitive to the details. Oppenheimer star depends dramatically on the van- ter of hours, as measured by their watch-
published two papers on this subject tage point of the observer. es. They would, however, be subject to
with his students Robert Serber and monstrous tidal gravitational forces
George M. Volkoff and concluded that Two Views of a Collapse that would tear them to pieces.
the mass limit here is comparable to the The year was 1939, and the world it-
Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarfs.
The first of these papers was published L
et us start with an observer at rest a
safe distance from the star. Let us
in 1938, and the second in 1939. (The also suppose that there is another observ-
self was about to be torn to pieces. Op-
penheimer was soon to go off to war to
build the most destructive weapon ever
real source of stellar energyfusion er attached to the surface of the star devised by humans. He never worked
was discovered in 1938 by Hans Bethe co-moving with its collapsewho can on the subject of black holes again. As
and Carl Friedrich von Weizscker, but send light signals back to his stationary far as I know, Einstein never did, either.
it took a few years to be accepted, and colleague. The stationary observer will In peacetime, in 1947, Oppenheimer be-
so astrophysicists continued to pursue see the signals from his moving coun- came the director of the Institute for Ad-
alternative theories.) terpart gradually shift to the red end of vanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where
Oppenheimer went on to ask exactly the electromagnetic spectrum. If the fre- Einstein was still a professor. From time
what Eddington had wondered about quency of the signals is thought of as a to time they talked. There is no record
white dwarfs: What would happen if clock, the stationary observer will say of their ever having discussed black
one had a collapsing star whose mass that the moving observers clock is grad- holes. Further progress would have to
exceeded any of the limits? Einsteins ually slowing down. wait until the 1960s, when discoveries
1939 rejection of black holesto which Indeed, at the Schwarzschild radius the of quasars, pulsars and compact x-ray
Oppenheimer and his students were cer- clock will slow down to zero. The sta- sources reinvigorated thinking about
tainly oblivious, for they were working tionary observer will argue that it took the mysterious fate of stars. SA
The Reluctant Father of Black Holes Copyright 1996 Scientific American, Inc. Scientific American June 1996 85