The black hole fifty years after: Genesis of the name

TL;DR

This paper explores the historical origins of the term 'black hole', tracing its conceptual and linguistic roots from the 18th-century Black Hole of Calcutta to its modern scientific usage, highlighting contributions by Wheeler and Dicke.

Contribution

It challenges the conventional attribution of the term 'black hole' solely to John Wheeler, proposing a collaborative origin involving Robert Dicke and Wheeler rooted in earlier historical references.

Findings

The term 'black hole' predates Wheeler's usage by centuries.

Historical references link the term to the Black Hole of Calcutta.

The naming of 'black hole' involves a complex interplay of scientific and historical factors.

Abstract

Black holes are extreme spacetime deformations where even light is imprisoned. There is an extensive astrophysical evidence for the real and abundant existence of these prisons of matter and light in the Universe. Mathematically, black holes are described by solutions of the field equations of the theory of general relativity, the first of which was published in 1916 by Karl Schwarzschild. Another highly relevant solution, representing a rotating black hole, was found by Roy Kerr in 1963. It was only much after the publication of the Schwarzschild solution, however, that the term black hole was employed to describe these objects. Who invented it? Conventional wisdom attributes the origin of the term to the prominent North American physicist John Wheeler who first adopted it in a general audience article published in 1968. This, however, is just one side of a story that begins two hundred years before in an Indian prison colloquially known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. Robert Dicke, also a distinguished physicist and colleague of Wheeler at Princeton University, aware of the prison's tragedy began, around 1960, to compare gravitationally completely collapsed stars to the black hole of Calcutta. The whole account thus suggests reconsidering who indeed coined the name black hole and commends acknowledging its definitive birth to a partnership between Wheeler and Dicke.