"Beginnings of Black Hole Physics"

Monday, October 20, 4pm, Room PSC 1136

C.V. Vishveshwara, Indian Institute of Astrophysics

The black-hole saga began nearly a century ago with Schwarzschild’s derivation of the first solution to Einstein’s field equations of general relativity immediately after the formulation of the theory in 1915. At the time, the apparent singular behaviour of space-time at the Schwarzschild radius, identified now with the black-hole event horizon, was an enigma to physicists including Einstein. The black hole lay more or less dormant till the 1960s and the early 1970s, when there was a flurry of activity in the study of the basic properties of both the static Schwarzschild- and the rotating Kerr black holes. The talk will outline the history of this early phase and the salient features of black-hole physics including the work that was carried out at UMD. The talk will be non-technical and aimed at a general audience.