I was watching a video about black holes, and when they mentioned that Einstein proved black holes exist with maths, it hit me.
I’ve never asked myself that question, how do numbers tell you that something exist in outer space and what to expect from it? especially things that we never knew they existed in the first place (exp black/white holes) ?
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Einstein did not prove that black holes exist. He proved that, according to our best understanding of matter, energy, and gravity, they *could* exist. In other words, one consequence of the theory of general relativity is that under certain conditions, a ‘black hole’ would form.
Whether those conditions actually arise in nature, and whether what happens next does in fact match the theory, are questions you can only answer by observation. But amazingly, since the 1960’s a body of evidence has been growing to suggest there really are things out there which, as far as we can tell, do line up with the math. There are massive, dark, compact objects out there. We only know so much about them quantitatively, but so far, every test we’ve been able to do has come back as yes, these things do seem to behave like the black holes of the theory.
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