Re: "Rogue" black holes in SF?

Brion K. Lienhart <brionl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>David DeLaney wrote:
>> ...A passing star? Passing dwarf star? (I don't think ... okay, wiki
says
>> "a passing 'dark star'". It was from 1951, so I don't think "black
hole" was
>> a widespread enough concept yet to have made it into the SF
literature...
>> ...okay, wiki notes that 'event horizon' didn't show up as a concept
until
>> 1958, and the "black hole" term dates to 1967. Fair enough.)
>
>There was a "black star" in _Skylark of Space_, a star so big that the 
>escape velocity was higher than the speed of light. It wasn't a 
>singularity though.

They did know about Schwarzschild solutions ever since the early years of
that century, they just didn't manage to make enough sense out of them to
convince people that they'd possibly exist until the middle of it. And
"escape velocity > c" went back way before Einstein - he just showed it
had some nasty _meaning_ attached. So 'dark star' would probably have been
as good a description as any in those intervening decades. On the other
hand,
didn't the Skylarks comfortably exceed the speed of light without even
trying much? So it wouldn't have been the same sort of issue for them that
it is now...

Dave
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