Twenty‐eight years ago, in a celebrated article in PHYSICS TODAY entitled “Introducing the Black Hole,” Remo Ruffini and John Wheeler filed a dispatch from the campaign to understand gravity. With hindsight, we now see that they wrote in the middle of a golden age—spanning the mid‐1960s and the late 1970s—when remarkable discoveries in the theory of general relativity were made to confront equally stunning developments in observational astronomy.

1.
J.
Kormendy
,
J. D.
Richstone
,
Ann. Rev. Astron. Astrophys.
33
,
581
(
1995
).
2.
M. J.
Rees
,
Rev. Mod. Astron.
10
,
179
(
1997
).
3.
Y.
Tanaka
,
N.
Shibazaki
,
Ann. Rev. Astron. Astrophys.
34
,
607
(
1996
).
4.
K. S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, Norton, New York (1994).
This content is only available via PDF.
You do not currently have access to this content.