Book Review – Black Hole : How an idea abandoned by Newtonians, hated by Einstein, and gambled on by Hawking became loved by Marcia Bartusiak

‘Black Hole : How an idea abandoned by Newtonians, hated by Einstein, and gambled on by Hawking became loved‘ by Marcia Bartusiak is an interesting book on the history of black holes and how the idea evolved, and how they were finally discovered. Starts from the earliest times and ends with the discovery of gravitational waves.

For me the strength of the book was the depiction of the personalities of the scientists involved. For example, Fritz Zwicky, Walter Baade, Karl Schwarzschild, Hermann Minkowski, Chandra (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar), Arthur Eddington, Robert Oppenheimer, J.A.Wheeler, Lev Landau and others. One of my favourite passages in the book was about Fritz Zwicky –

“Despite Caltech’s relaxed campus atmosphere, a hallmark of the California lifestyle, Zwicky retained the authoritative air of a nineteenth-century European professor. He was an aggressive, original, and stubbornly opinionated man, the supreme scientific individualist. He regularly annoyed his physics and astronomy colleagues by studying anything he pleased (he called astronomy his “hobby”) and championing along the way some pretty wild ideas, some that waited decades to be proven true. In 1933 he was the first to propose, for example, the existence of cosmic “dark matter” (what he called in German “dunkle Materie”), today one of astronomy’s outstanding mysteries. “Zwicky was one of those people,” recalled Caltech astronomer Wallace Sargent, “who was determined to show the other guy was wrong. His favorite phrase was, ‘I’ll show those bastards,’” which he did to the fullest.”

I couldn’t stop smiling when I read that 😊

I enjoyed reading this book. Hoping to read more books by Marcia Bartusiak. Have you read this one?

Advertisement