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Who is sillier: Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our
generation, or Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott:

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, "A Brief
History of Time", Chapter 6:
"Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how
it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles,
one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that
cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really
consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newtons theory of
gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired
upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will
eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward
at a constant speed...)"

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8572
Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott: "Although black
holes lie at the frontier of astronomy, the idea such objects might
exist stretches back more than 200 years. In the late 1700s, British
professor John Michell and French astronomer and mathematician Pierre
Simon, Marquis de Laplace, advanced the idea of what Laplace called
"dark bodies." Using Newton's concepts of light and gravity, they
reasoned that the gravitational pull of a massive star could grow
large enough to prevent light from escaping. Unfortunately, Newton's
theory could not describe what happens when gravity grows that strong.
Enter Albert Einstein. In 1916, his general theory of relativity put
black holes on a firm footing."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation: "Interestingly
enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper in 1799 on how some stars could
have a gravitational field so strong that light could not escape, but
would be dragged back onto the star. He even calculated that a star of
the same density as the Sun, but two hundred and fifty times the size,
would have this property. But although Laplace may not have realised
it, the same idea had been put forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge
man, John Mitchell, in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society. Both Mitchell and Laplace thought of light as
consisting of particles, rather like cannon balls, that could be
slowed down by gravity, and made to fall back on the star. But a
famous experiment, carried out by two Americans, Michelson and Morley
in 1887, showed that light always travelled at a speed of one hundred
and eighty six thousand miles a second, no matter where it came from.
How then could gravity slow down light, and make it fall back."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com