History of Giant Black Holes

SACKLER PUBLIC LECTURE
Donald Lynden-Bell (University of Cambridge)

In 1783 John Michell predicted the existence of invisible objects of 1.3 hundred million times the mass of the Sun. A few years later Pierre-Simon Laplace made the same suggestion. Today such objects are called black holes. Professor Lynden-Bell will trace Michell’s ideas through a tangled web of new theories and amazing observations to the definitive discovery of a black hole of 4 hundred million times the mass of the Sun in 1995. Prof. Lynden-Bell will show how simple ideas that are before their time get forgotten and neglected by later generations when there are no observations to demonstrate them. However such ideas can revive when relevant observations are made many generations later.

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Admission: FREE