A British clergyman who predicted black holes in 1783

&gt; ...there was one person who showed remarkable prescience about black holes...<p>&gt; According to McCormmach, the existence of invisible stars was a relatively common idea among scientists of the time.<p>Talk about burying the lede. The life and times of Michell seem irrelevant here, when in fact many were calculating the idea of stars so heavy they would recapture their own light. And they were calculating this based on an incorrect principle of light-as-massive-particles. And these dark stars did not behave at all as black holes do according to modern theories.<p>So, black holes were not in fact predicted by British clergyman John Michell. This could have been an interesting article if it hadn&#x27;t tried to force its deceptive headline.

Sure, and the ancient Greeks predicted the heat death of the universe. The premise that all matter has an intrinsic type, and that all types tend to either float or sink relative to the others, and that in the long run all matter will be organized into perfect spheres of homogeneous layers, is totally in line with our modern understanding of entropy.<p>Every old theory was sort of right if you just ignore all the ways it was wrong and interpret it very liberally.

The more mass, the more gravity.<p>The more gravity, the larger the escape velocity.<p>But there&#x27;s a maximum speed in the universe, the speed of light.<p>If a body has so much mass that the escape velocity is higher than the speed of light, you got a black hole.

Makes me think of Charles Babage and Ada Lovelace. I do not think either got much recognition until relatively recently.