Cosmo 101 The Schwarzschild metric

So we’ve recently been looking at one metric in particular, the Schwarzschild metric. There is an interesting history to this one. So Einstein published some of his finding concerning general relativity in 1915. This same year a man by the name of Karl Schwarzschild was serving in the German army and thinking about these same sorts of things. He came up with some equations that are now the Schwarzschild metric. And then he died only a couple of month later. Einstein didn’t think it was even possible to come up with these sorts of equations. It makes you wonder what he would have come up if his life hadn’t been cut short. Anyway, these equations, like any metric, describe a world and the way physics works around this world. Formally we say these equations describe the spacetime geometry for a certain situation. Well the Schwarzschild metric describes the world around a spherical non-rotating mass. The most famous examples are black holes! Yes, that’s right, we get to talk about black holes! Perhaps I should do a bit of an introduction. Most black holes arise from a star finally giving in to gravity and collapsing in on its self. At this point all of that matter is compresses so much that it sort of tears spacetime and creates the mysterious black hole. But anyway if you were to stand right outside a black hole your spacetime and hence the laws of physics will be governed by the Schwarzschild metric. It’s a very twisted spacetime that I don’t really understand completely but I think I shall have more information for you tomorrow.