"These objects which have been known, I would say, for 40 or 50 years, but theoretically for the best part of a century, have always been fascinating. They're odd things. The simplest way to describe a black hole would be, a region of space from which even light can't escape. Predictions that such objects existed go all the way back to the beginnings of relativity back at the turn of the 20th century."
"But actually, really, I would say, into the 1960s, perhaps even into the 1980s, many physicists felt that because of the intellectual challenges that these predicted objects pose, many physicists felt that maybe nature would not create them. I even saw the great physicist Steven Weinberg say that he in some sense hopes that these things would not exist, because they're so confusing. But we now know that they do exist, and so, we have to face the challenges that they pose."
Black holes sit at the crossroads of relativity and quantum theory and raise fundamental questions about space, time, and reality. A black hole is a region of space from which even light cannot escape. Predictions of such objects date back to the origins of relativity in the early 20th century, though theoretical work and skepticism persisted through much of the century. Many physicists initially doubted that nature would form black holes because of the conceptual challenges they present. Observational confirmation of their existence compels confronting those challenges and searching for a quantum theory of gravity.
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