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) ?
In: 407
You can prove certain things are always true.
Very smart people looked at the sky and measured how planets and the sun moved, they noticed patterns in the movement.
They used maths to describe the pattern and noticed they were able to predict where things would be.
If a maths equation is always right, its proven, it becomes a fact thats always true ( until we find out its not because its actually way more complicated!)
Equations are cool because they mean you can use reason to infer facts about the universe. If it’s always true x = y +1, and you know x, you will always know y.
You need to do this with outer space because we can’t go and see for ourselves! We can go weigh a planet to see its mass. But we can work out an equation that means if we know where a planet is in the sky we know a bunch of other stuff too!
An easy example is gravity. We understand gravity pretty well. But we can’t see gravity. Not directly.
But we know as a mathematical fact that gravity effects light. And light we can measure! And we know a bunch of facts about light too! We know a lot about orbits and can measure those too (using light to see em!).
We can’t see the black hole at the center of the milky way, but we can see all the stars moving around it. We can _infer_ its there because all our equations that explain the universe say it has to be there.
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