The Curious History of Relativity:

[P Taylor]

Well, this could add the additional lost-and-foundness that black
holes (in their role as objects from which things couldn't escape),
were postulated by John Michell in the 1780s, even before Relativity
and Hawking and Penrose...

--pt

On 10/18/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Curious History of Relativity:
> How Einstein's Theory of Gravity Was Lost and Found
> Again
>
> Jean Eisenstaedt
>
> Cloth | 2006 | $29.95 / £18.95 | ISBN: 0-691-11865-5
> 384 pp. | 6 x 9 | 29 halftones. 22 line illus.
>
> Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents
> Introduction [HTML] or [PDF format]
>
> Black holes may obliterate most things that come near
> them, but they saved the theory of general relativity.
> Einstein's theory was quickly accepted as the true
> theory of gravity after its publication in 1915, but
> soon took a back seat in physics to quantum mechanics
> and languished for decades on the blackboards of
> mathematicians. Not until the existence of black holes
> by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose in the 1960s,
> after Einstein's death, was the theory revived.
>
> Almost one hundred years after general relativity
> replaced Newton's theory of gravitation, The Curious
> History of Relativity tells the story of both events
> surrounding general relativity and the techniques
> employed by Einstein and the relativists to construct,
> develop, and understand his almost impenetrable
> theory. Jean Eisenstaedt, one of the world's leading
> experts on the subject, also discusses the theory's
> place in the evolution of twentieth-century physics.
> He describes the main stages in the development of
> general relativity: its beginnings, its strange
> crossing of the desert during Einstein's lifetime
> while under heated criticism, and its new life from
> the 1960s on, when it became vital to the
> understanding of black holes and the observation of
> exotic objects, and, eventually, to the discovery of
> the accelerating universe. We witness Einstein's
> construction of his theory, as well as the work of his
> fascinated, discouraged, and enthusiastic
> colleagues--physicists, mathematicians, and
> astronomers.
>
> http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/8251.html
>
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