Falling asleep in physics class, or how not to name a black hole

I almost completely escaped the gravitational pull of math and science as an undergraduate at Princeton — with one exception: Professor John Wheeler’s Introduction to Physics. Because I was a French major, and there was no internet, I had no idea that Wheeler was a giant in his field. I thought he was just another professor who forced me to wake up at seven in the morning.

Wheeler modeled nuclear fission with Niels Bohr, he tossed off an idea that won his student Richard Feynman a Nobel Prize, he rejuvenated the study of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — all before I showed up in his lecture hall.

Wheeler dealt with big ideas. He wrestled with a prediction from Einstein’s equations that massive numbers of dead stars could collapse into a heap so infinitely dense that light could not escape from it. In fact, every galaxy has such a place where space and time end, and where stars can disappear forever.

Three guys out for a walk. That’s Wheeler on the right.

Although this could have turned into a super massive naming problem, it didn’t. At a New York conference in 1967, someone in the audience apparently shouted out “black hole!” and that was it. Wheeler seized on the name and that was that. This is what can happen when there is a naming committee of one.

The universe is peppered with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars. Others hold the remains of millions, even billions of suns.

Wheeler wrote that the black hole “teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but.”

There is no unified system for naming black holes. The names are all over the place.

Wheeler did manage to come up with a great name on his own later in his career, however. Wrestling with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which stated that it was impossible to know both the velocity and the position of a subatomic particle — knowing one destroyed the ability to measure the other, he referred to this cloud of possibility as “a smoky dragon.”

Einstein was reportedly frustrated by this kind of thinking. He once asked Wheeler if the moon was still there when nobody looked at it.