00:00 Hi, you are watching In Death With Me Ila.
00:14 Oppenheimer is doing wonders at the box office.
00:18 The spotlight is currently shining bright on the American theoretical physicist J. Robert
00:22 Oppenheimer, almost 50 years after his death.
00:26 Today, when people are excited about the Oppenheimer movie and can only imagine J. Robert Oppenheimer
00:31 as the "father of atomic bomb", very few people know that the astrophysicist also played
00:36 a stellar role in other discoveries too.
00:39 One such remarkable feat achieved by Oppenheimer is his role in the discovery of black holes.
00:49 This is because, the father of the atom bomb, had along with his University of California
00:53 Berkeley colleague Hartland S. Snyder, published a pioneering paper in 1939 entitled, "On
00:59 Continued Gravitational Contraction", in which equations of Albert Einstein's general relativity
01:04 and gravity were used to explain how black holes could be born.
01:08 Oppenheimer proposed the very first collapse model to describe how a star could collapse
01:13 into a black hole.
01:15 This model by Oppenheimer explains the formation of black holes as a dynamical astrophysical
01:20 process, the final stage of the evolution of heavy enough stars and is still being used
01:24 today.
01:25 Oppenheimer's model is very significant because it is analytically solvable, solving the equations
01:31 can be done with pen and paper and does not require numerical work.
01:35 All the physics is thus easily trackable.
01:38 Despite being simple, it is complex enough to describe many of the features of a collapsing
01:43 star.
01:45 Oppenheimer's brief foray into astrophysics began with a 1938 paper about neutron stars,
01:53 which continued in a 1939 installment that further incorporated the principles of Einstein's
01:58 general theory of relativity.
02:01 He then published a third paper on black holes on September 1, 1939, but at the time, it
02:07 was scarcely noticed because this was the very day Germany invaded Poland, launching
02:11 World War II.
02:21 Oppenheimer never wrote on the topic again.
02:24 At a time when Oppenheimer and Snyder were working on the paper which was heavily dependent
02:28 on the 1915 theory of general relativity, the father of the theory, Einstein, was completing
02:33 the research which was aimed at proving that black holes do not exist.
02:38 However, Oppenheimer and his colleagues are believed to be the first scientists who truly
02:42 understood the black hole's physical birth.
02:45 Three years after publishing the paper, Oppenheimer traveled to Los Alamos where he cemented his
02:50 place in history and in the public's perception.
02:54 Despite his significant contributions to the field of black holes, Oppenheimer's legacy
02:58 remains closely tied to his involvement in the development of the atomic bomb.
03:03 His work on black holes and his pioneering collapse model, though often overlooked by
03:07 the public, continues to influence and shape our understanding of the physical world.
03:11 "
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