BLACK HOLES AND BEYOND

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       Singularities and their big brothers, black holes, play important roles in cosmologists’ attempts to understand the workings of the universe. Not only does a singularity appear to describe the state of the universe at its inception, but black holes and their associated singularities seem to power quasars, the most energetic objects in the universe, and may even offer potential passageways into entirely different universes.
 

       Although general relativity breaks down at a singularity, it’s the only theory that can describe the exotic region of space-time surrounding it—the black hole. It’s surprising, then, that the idea of a black hole dates back to well before Einstein. In the late 1700s, British professor John Michell and French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, advanced the idea of what Laplace called “dark bodies.” Using Newton’s concepts of gravity and light, they reasoned that the gravitational pull of a very massive star could be large enough to prevent even light, traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, from escaping.