2006/01/01 by Brandon Carter
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.2218167
30 pages latex. Contrib. to Encuentros Relativistas Espanoles: A Century of Relativity Theory, Oviedo, 2005 (ed. L. Mornas)
openalex publication_date 2006/01/01 · arxiv created 2006/04/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Although implicit in the discovery of the Schwarzschild solution 40 years earlier, the issues raised by the theory of what are now known as black holes were so unsettling to physicists of Einstein's generation that the subject remained in a state of semiclandestine gestation until his demise. That turning point -- just half a century after Einstein's original foundation of relativity theory, and just half a century ago today -- can be considered to mark the birth of black hole theory as a subject of systematic development by physicists of a new and less inhibited generation, whose enthusastic investigations have revealed structures of unforeseen mathematical beauty, even though questions about the physical significance of the concomitant singularities remain controversial.