There is a scene in Christopher Nolan’s new film, Oppenheimer, where the eponymous physicist is thronged by his adoring pupils after his paper is published. They have gathered to celebrate the ‘black hole paper’ that J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote with his student Hartland Snyder. “The world will remember the day,” one of his students says.
The world of physics does indeed remember the paper. While Oppenheimer is remembered in history as the “father of the atomic bomb”, his greatest contribution as a physicist was on the physics of black holes. The work of Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder helped transform black holes from figments of mathematics to real, physical possibilities – something to be found in the cosmos out there.
