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
It is sort of the other way around. We humans try to describe the way things work using equations. We make those equations based on what we observe. When the equations are useful for predicting how things work, then we use them to predict. Toss them or modify them if they do not quite work, or do not work at all.
Sometimes an equation, or the many different secondary equations (functions) that follow logically/mathematically from the first one, indicate something ought to happen but we have never seen it. Of course, being curious humans, we then look for it, to see if it really exists.
Sometimes, we find new things that way. For example, Einstein’s equations said that light ought to “bend” when passing close to a massive object like a star. That “bending” was confirmed a few years later during a solar eclipse. This meant that the equations were actually predicting real world behavior. What else could be true, then? What do the equations indicate will happen when mass gets huge and distance gets very small? Well, eventually, when mass gets high and distance (volume) gets small, the function blows up toward infinity (becomes undefined, “breaks”).
The black hole situation is what the equations predict will happen when mass gets very high and volume goes very small. So, people looked to see if it really happens. Turns out it does. Apparently.
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