Invisible Universe Lecture Reviewed

On Thursday, July 24, 2012, the Iron County
Museum in cooperation with the Caspian DDA
hosted a presentation about the invisible universe
featuring Dr. Albert Holm, former resident and
retired staff member on the Hubble Space
Telescope. Dr. Holm is an astronomer.

The event was well attended and the presentation
started off well with slides of interesting visible
features in the universe. But the lecture began to
run into trouble as soon as the discussion turned
to the first of the invisible features, “black holes”.
It began with Dr. Holm attributing the prediction
of black holes to Einstein’s theory of relativity
when, in fact, the earliest recorded prediction of a
dark star was made by John Mitchell in a 1784
letter to Henry Cavendish of science fame.
Mitchell was a cosmologist who turned some of
his initiatives to earth science, a branch of
cosmology that later became the specialties today
known as geology and geophysics, the realm my
father made his life’s work because of his keen
interest in gravity. Mitchell, too, discussed his
interest in the topic and did some interesting work
in the geophysics of the British Isles.

By 1796, LaPlace, a mathematician and astronomer,
wrote a book that included a speculative discussion
about high gravity objects that trap light, including
some of the features of what we today call a black
hole.

So by the time Einstein came along with his works,
the concept that led to black hole theory already had a
long history. Major advances in this subject came about
when Roger Penrose took an interest in the possibilities
and arrived in Princeton (NJ) to collaborate with John
Wheeler on the topic of “singularities”. I had the good
fortune to spend an evening with Penrose in 1964,
which event triggered my ongoing work on an, as
yet, unfinished paper on this topic. Wheeler was the
one who came up with the name “black hole” that is
in common usage today.

Dr. Holm’s second insult to the topic came about
when he proposed that a star “…grazes the surface
of a black hole…” A black hole has no surface. That’s
one of the salient features of the “structure” which, as
we see it today, is a gravitational anomaly created by
a huge collapsed star and fed afterwards by whatever

material gets close enough to be eaten by the black
hole. Once material goes into a black hole, it is gone
forever as far as we know.

The lecture was well intentioned. It appears that the
excellent attendance was a result of Dr. Holm’s
popularity based on past lectures he has delivered
locally. Iron County Doings wishes him, and the
museum, well while hopeful that in future presentations
he will stick to topics that he can deliver with reasonable
accuracy[1]. I attended the event with a hope to hear
about advances in black hole theory, and I left shortly
after I discovered that the lecturer was out of his depth
on the topic of my interest.

Bill Vajk

[1] It is noteworthy that "The Science Channel" has
several excellent presentations on the topic of Dr. Holm's
lecture discussed above in the series called "How
The Universe Works." Iron County Doings commends
that series to all readers with any interest whatever in the
topics covered in this article. The science channel series
is available on DVD through Amazon.com and other
vendors. Further highly recommended popular science
genre presentations are available with Morgan Freeman
as host.