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
Our understanding of the universe gets better from year to year. What happens is we try something, or look at something, and we realize that the math we have doesn’t give us the same answers as what we see in real life. So people come up with a better model for how we think the universe works, and we write better math that we think gives us better predictions based on that model.
And once we find math that seems to match what we see better, people then start using the math to see what would happen in the universe in situations that we haven’t been able to see yet.
Einstein came up with some better equations that describe gravity better than the ones we had before. He and Swartzchild started trying to see what those equations would say about situations where gravity was very very strong, and the equations gave them some really weird answers suggesting that there would be these bubbles in space that light can’t escape from.
A lot of science is taking better math like this, finding new things that the math predicts that we haven’t seen yet, and then searching for those things. Once we verified that black holes were real, this gave us a lot of confidence that the math Einstein and others have come up with is the best description of reality.
But we also know it’s still not complete. Quantum physics teaches us that a lot about the universe is actually about probability at small scales, but we can see that gravity doesn’t behave probabilistically, so there’s a lot more room for people to come up with better math, and then we can start using that math to see what other strange things might exist that we don’t know about today.
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