The One Who Stole Hawking's Thunder (Part One)

After Xu Yun gave him an affirmative answer,

Yang Zhenning subconsciously drew an [O]-shaped circle on the abacus paper in front of him. His gaze flickered with an unreadable light.

"Black holes?"

As mentioned earlier,

in the late 1940s of this century, people had successfully quantized various matter fields in flat spacetime.

Naturally, they then tried to figure out how to quantize matter fields in curved spacetime, as well as the gravitational field itself.

Even when they encountered enormous difficulties and resistance in establishing a self-consistent theory of quantum gravity, that did not stop them from building quantum field theory in curved spacetime.

At the time, spacetime was still classical, while matter fields were quantized.

But unlike the first and second laws of Newtonian mechanics, which could be verified in any open space, the concept of a "field" was easy to calculate with but difficult to verify through observable phenomena—at least with the technology available in the 1960s.

And black holes were undoubtedly a powerful setting in which to test quantum field theory in curved spacetime.

The idea of black holes had actually been proposed very early—so early that it might overturn many people's assumptions:

The concept of a black hole first appeared in 1783.

That's right.

Not 1983, nor 1883, but 1783.

That year was the forty-eighth year of Qianlong's reign in Huaxia. Emperor Qianlong had finished his fourth eastern inspection of Shengjing and spent a great deal of money along the way.

At the same time, on the fifth day after Qianlong arrived in Jilin,

John Michell, a geology professor and clergyman at Cambridge University, speculated in a lecture to the Royal Society of Britain about the effect of the Sun's gravity on the light it emitted.

Rømer, who came before him, had determined in the seventeenth century