My neighborhood astrophysicist (no joke) tells me that the French term for "black hole" is, according to his French colleagues, obscene. But he doesn't speak French or know what it is.
Can anyone help?
Merci.
psw
1
vinnyd
According to Kip Thorne in Black Holes and Time Warps, the French resisted the term "black hole" when it was coined by the physicist John Wheeler, because to them it, or at least "trou noir", the French equivalent, sounded obscene. Once it became universal and they had begun to accept it, it was discovered that (I'm probably going to get this wrong) not everything did a black hole swallow everything up but it was impossible to get information about what was happening "inside" a black hole from, e.g., the radiation around it. Wheeler, in order to tweak the French (one asumes), summarized this principle as "a black hole has no hair."
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