hoist on their own petard

1a Topical Words: Black Hole
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The death of the famous American physicist John Wheeler last Sunday raised an intriguing language question. Most of his obituaries say he invented the term "black hole" for the astronomical phenomenon; in most cases this was the headline or lead-in to the text.

For example, the New Scientist wrote about him, "With his flair for poetry, Wheeler coined the terms 'black hole' and 'wormhole', words that captured the imaginations of physicists and the public alike." The Daily Princetonian, at his old university of Princeton, said he was "a legendary physicist who coined the phrase 'black hole' and who left an indelible mark on the physics department in his four decades as a University professor". The Guardian's piece explained that, "in a talk at the Goddard Institute, New York, in 1967, [he] spontaneously came up with the name 'black hole' to describe it." The Oxford English Dictionary might seem to concur, as its first citation is from a 1968 article by John Wheeler in American Scientist.

But did he really invent it? Other obituaries said not.

The Scientific American noted: "Wheeler recalls discussing such 'completely collapsed gravitational objects' at a conference in 1967, when someone in the audience casually dropped the phrase 'black hole.' Wheeler immediately adopted the phrase for its brevity and 'advertising value,' and it caught on." The Daily Telegraph obituary differed only in one detail: "A student at the conference called out 'black hole' as a suggestion, and Dr Wheeler made the name stick." This, not incidentally, is over a subhead that says that he coined the term.

John Wheeler himself never claimed that he invented "black hole". Stephen Hall wrote in an article in the New York Times in October 1992 that "The term, Dr. Wheeler said in an interview, was actually suggested by someone else - he can't remember who - during a 1967 meeting at the [Goddard] Institute for Space Studies in New York and was intended as a substitute for 'gravitationally completely collapsed star.' 'After you get around to saying that about 10 times,' Dr. Wheeler recalled, 'you look desperately for something better.'"

So he didn't coin it - he popularised it. But the chances are high he will go down in history as its creator. It raises an intriguing question about the way in which a tale that's denied by its central figure can still be widely believed.

There's some doubt even that the unnamed person at the meeting had invented it on the spot. Fred Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, this week found an earlier example in the issue of the Science News Letter for 18 January 1964, in a report by Ann Ewing on a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, as mass is added to a degenerate star a sudden collapse will take place and the intense gravitational field of the star will close in on itself. Such a star then forms a 'black hole' in the universe."

Whoever it was Ann Ewing heard use the term at the 1964 meeting might have been the one who suggested it to John Wheeler at the 1967 one. Or it may have been someone else who heard it or who had read the report. Or it could be a case of separate and unconnected inventions. The latter is certainly possible because of "black hole" having been at one time the official name for the lock-up in a barracks. The infamous appearance of the term in British history, the only reason the term in that sense is still remembered, is the incident in 1756 known as the Black Hole of Calcutta in which 146 Europeans were confined in a cell overnight, of whom only 23 survived until the morning.

Does it matter who invented "black hole" as a snappy alternative to the phrase "gravitationally completely collapsed star"? If we're happy to ascribe legends to our great men, probably not. If we prefer truth to fiction, then it's worth putting the record straight.

1b Feedback, notes and comments
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BLACK HOLE Emery Fletcher, who was one of John Wheeler's graduate students in 1962, commented on last week's discussion of the origin of this term. "Wheeler was indeed its popularizer. Furthermore, he learned that the literal French translation was obscene, and as one who strongly objected to what he regarded as French arrogance in expunging any hint of Anglicizing, he used 'black hole' at every opportunity. The phrase he did actually coin, to describe the fact that no light or material issues from a black hole, was 'a black hole has no hair'. That one is even more formidably obscene to the French. Throughout his life he claimed that he'd coined the phrase innocently, but the claim was always made with the famous Wheeler twinkle in his eye."

(I wonder if he was influenced in creating that phrase by "comet", whose name derives from the classical Greek "aster kometes", or long-haired star.)

John Wheeler, as he would wish, has the last laugh, since everybody links his name to "black hole", on a principle that Walter Meyer pointed out was promulgated by Ogden Nash in his poem Columbus:

He discovered America and they put him in jail for it,
And the fetters gave him welts,
And they named America after somebody else,
So the sad fate of Columbus ought to be pointed out
to every child and every voter,
Because it has a very important moral, which is,
Don't be a discoverer, be a promoter.

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