And yes, Chiu said, he may have used the term at the meeting, but it didn’t originate with him. Before Bartusiak’s talk, Trimble reached Chiu and asked him about the black hole mystery. Perhaps, someone suggested, it was Hong-Yee Chiu, who organized the session. But he didn’t remember who used the term there, either. Just as Bartusiak, Trimble and I were discussing the Science News Letter story about black holes, along came Charles Misner of the University of Maryland, one of the physicists named in Ewing’s story as attending the 1964 Cleveland AAAS meeting. She’s more knowledgeable about the history of all things astronomical than Leonard Maltin is about Hollywood movies. This is just the sort of thing that scientists and journalists discuss in the hotel bar during astrophysics conferences, especially when one of the scientists is Virginia Trimble, an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine. “Such a star then forms a ‘black hole’ in the universe,” Ewing wrote - in the Januissue, beating Life magazine by a week.Įwing’s report listed the names of several speakers at that AAAS meeting, but she did not identify who had uttered the black hole phrase. Science News Letter reporter Ann Ewing reported from that meeting, describing how an intense gravitational field could cause a star to collapse in on itself. It seems that the “black hole” label was also bandied about in January 1964 in Cleveland at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That honor goes to Science News Letter, the early long-form name of Science News. Life magazine does not, however, win the distinction of being the first publication to use black hole in print. Bartusiak tracked him down, and Rosenfeld confirmed that he had heard the term at the meeting (he didn’t make it up himself), but he didn’t remember who said it, either.
Life’s science editor, Al Rosenfeld, had attended the symposium and used the term in his report. But somebody did, because the term appeared in the January 24, 1964, issue of Life magazine. Wheeler himself spoke at the symposium, but no one recalls him naming black holes back then. “It was used right here at the first Texas symposium, somewhere, by someone.”
She discovered that “black hole” was spoken in Dallas in December 1963. “Why not call it a black hole?” the listener urged, as Wheeler later recalled.īut in fact, the term had been used four years earlier at an astrophysics conference in Dallas, as science writer Marcia Bartusiak reported this month in a talk at the 50th anniversary of that conference, the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.īartusiak, a professor in the science writing program at MIT and author of several highly acclaimed books, has been tracking down the history of black holes for a forthcoming book.
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