Schwarzschild's Solution to Einstein's Equation Implies the Existence of a Black Hole

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Einstein's equation implies the existence of something called a black hole. Nobody appreciated that at the time. They didn't appreciate it really until the 1950s or 60s. This lesson about the coordinates being human inventions hadn't quite sunken in. These days we know you can pick better coordinates and you can go past R equals 2GM and you can going into the black hole.

My little pandemic-lockdown contribution to the world was a series of videos called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The idea was to explain physics in a pedagogical way, concentrating on established ideas rather than speculations, with the twist that I tried to include and explain any equations that seemed useful, even though no prior mathematical knowledge was presumed. I’m in the process of writing a series of three books inspired by those videos, and the first one is coming out now: The Biggest Ideas In The Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. For this solo episode I go through one of the highlights from the book: explaining the mathematical and physical basis of Einstein’s equation of general relativity, relating mass and energy to the curvature of spacetime. Hope it works!

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