Originally posted on shankarkashyap:

Albert Einstein felt nature would not permit such things to exist despite his theory of general relativity allowed such a possibility.  It was unthinkable for him to have an enormous star; hundreds of times bigger than our sun could vanish from the universe.  An American journalist first named black holes in 1968 reporting on an American scientific meeting. 

American physicist, John Wheeler was the first one to describe an area of space which was “empty” and which “swallowed everything” including light.   Pierre-Simon Laplace and John Mitchell considered that such objects existed where the gravitational force was so great that light cannot escape in 18th Century, and were called “black stars” or “cold stars“.  In ancient Indian scripture, Mandokya Upanishad, probably composed around the second millennium BCE, talks about Vishwaruchi, which absorbs everything in the universe – Black Hole.  
Black holes were considered as scientific curiosities in the…

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