In September 1939, the paper that is now celebrated as the seed of the modern conception of a black hole was published by Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder: in it, they argued that a star may collapse without ever reaching a new equilibrium state, beyond its gravitational radius; it will become so dense that not even light emitted at its surface will escape. Just one month after Oppenheimer and Snyder’s paper appeared, Albert Einstein authored another article in which he argued that there was a limit to how much matter could be concentrated in a spacetime, and that as a consequence no “Schwarzschild singularity” would ever appear in nature.
Did Einstein intend to argue against Oppenheimer and Snyder, without even citing their work?
Did he even know of their paper, or is it a coincidence that the papers appeared so close to one another?
And how are differences of opinion to be understood in the light of how these authors understood general covariance and the dynamics of spacetime?
Using novel sources, we will address these questions, and try to answer how much in particular Einstein and his close colleagues knew of the way towards the unknowable: the path into the black hole (joint work with Dennis Lehmkuhl).
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