Black Hole by Marcia Bartusiak

Author:Marcia Bartusiak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300210859
Publisher: Yale University Press

9

Why Don’t You Call It a Black Hole?

The conference might never have happened were it not for strong martinis, coupled with a hot, lackluster Texas summer. The noted mathematician Ivor Robinson had just moved to Dallas at the start of 1963 to head the newly formed relativity group at the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (what later became the University of Texas, Dallas), and he was bored. As one observer put it, he was pining “for people who would recognize … a null bivector when they saw one.” So, over the long Fourth of July weekend, he invited a number of friends to visit his locale, then far from the usual watering holes in the field of general relativity.

While everyone was lazily fanning themselves as they sat around a suburban Dallas swimming pool on July 6, drinks in hand, the center’s chief scientific officer, physicist Lauriston Marshall, suggested that a little conference, perhaps with some twenty-five participants, might be just the thing to put their new institute on the map. “Give a little spice to life,” he said. Robinson, along with relativists Alfred Schild and Engelbert Schücking, visiting from the University of Texas at Austin, jumped at the idea.

While the three mulled over potential topics in the ensuing days, Schücking happened to mention the newly discovered quasars. “Nobody knows quite what they are,” he pointed out. “Why don’t we hold a conference on the subject?” Everyone agreed, but they recognized that such a big topic required a far bigger platform than they originally planned. So, the initial idea to hold an intimate workshop was soon “Texanized … [into] a big bash in Dallas,” as Schücking put it. The Dallas money, coming from the city’s establishment to help build a Princeton in Texas, was “particularly valuable,” added Schücking, “since it could be spent on liquor, while the Lone Star State money from Austin could be used only for more sober expenses.”

But what to name the conference? Here was a small relativity group holding a conference on what was largely an astronomical subject. “We fixed that,” said Schücking. He, along with Schild and Robinson, invented the name for an entirely new field. The conference title, they decided, would be “The Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics,” and they invited nearly everyone they could think of with a connection to this fresh discipline. “Relativity was the sleeping beauty and quasars the prince that woke her up,” says German science historian Jürgen Renn. It was the moment when many top physicists first learned that general relativity might actually be significant in the physical world.

The meeting took place in December 1963, right before the Christmas holidays, at a hotel in downtown Dallas, just blocks from the street where President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated three weeks before. Conference organizers had been urged to cancel the event because of the tragedy, but they decided to stay the course. Texas governor John Connally, also injured in that terrible episode, welcomed the conferees during the opening address with his arm in a cast.

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