I have some knowledge of calculus and differential equations, but what is it about his equations that jumped out? How did he see his equations and decide that this was a legitimate prediction rather than just some constructed “mathy” noise?
In: Mathematics
The theory of black holes are actually a hundred years older then Einstein. Starting with Newtons theory of gravity you can calculate the escape velocity. Basically this is the integral of the gravitational acceleration from the current distance between the bodies to infinity. Any object with a higher speed will be able to escape the gravity well while any object with less speed will orbit back at some point. The problem is that even light have speed so it is possible for some objects to be dense enough that even light can not go faster then the escape velocity and will therefore not be able to escape.
Einsteins theories of relatively is related to this. He expanded on the concept of a fixed speed of light and combined this with Newtons laws to make these equations fit. And he found out a lot of things, for example that the speed of light were actually a universal speed limit and that nothing can go faster then this. He also basically confirmed the theories of black holes, which at that point had been just cool ideas.
It was actually another physicist, Karl Schwarzschild, who worked on Einsteins field equations around black holes and found a solution to them that could accurately predict the ratio between the size and mass of a black hole. Using just the escape velocity does not quite work as Newtons formulas were not as accurate in these kinds of extreme environments. But Schwarzschild also found that at this radius a lot of the field equations ended up growing to infinity, a singularity. Essentially according to the math there were no space in a black hole and there were infinity space at this specific radius.
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