First Excerpt From The Edge of Knowledge: The Strange Flow of Time and the Unsung Father of Black Holes

The first of a series of excerpt from my new book, for Critical Mass paid subscribers

Hi.. Between now and May 9th, I will release a few excerpts of my new book, for Critical Mass paid subscribers. Here is the first one, from the section 1 of the book, which describes outstanding mysteries related to the nature of time.

The excerpt describes the first experiment that showed that gravity affects the passage of time, and then moves to discuss the most extreme case where gravity affects time, in a black hole. That discussion begins with the remarkable history of a forgotten clergyman and professor of geometry, Greek, Hebrew, philosophy, and geology at Cambridge, who, in 1783, anticipated the existence of black holes, which he called “dark stars”, and who calculated, correctly, 132 years before the development of General Relativity, that a star 500 times the mass of our Sun, with the same density as our Sun, would become a black hole: