But, if nature can make the radius of a given mass small enough, the escape velocity will increase until it reaches the speed of light, or 300,000 kilometres (186,000 miles) per second. The Moon's escape velocity, however, is only 2.4 kilometers per second because the Moon is one fourth the size of our planet and possesses only slightly more than 1% of its mass. For example, the escape velocity of the Earth is about 11.2 kilometers per second- this is the speed a rocket must attain before it can depart the Earth on a journey to the Moon or more distant planets. Schwarzschild realized the escape velocity from the surface of an object depends on both its mass and radius. The astrophysicist, John Archibald Wheeler, who coined the name "Black Hole", said it succinctly: "matter tells Space-Time how to curve, and Space-Time tells matter how to move." The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is due to the speed at which they are traveling. Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. A marble rolling across the trampoline will be inexorably drawn towards the bowling ball. Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to dimple or sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'. Objects distort the fabric of space-time based on their mass- more massive objects have a greater effect. There are three spatial dimensions (backwards-forwards, left-right and up-down) and one time dimension (which flows at one second per second). According to Einstein, matter and energy exist on a background of space and time. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had proposed, but a consequence of a distortion in space and time, conceived together in his theory as 'space-time'. When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity, he found a new way to describe gravity. Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to dimple or sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the 'geodetic effect'.Significantly, it provided support for a, then, seemingly implausible situation about the effects of severely compressed matter on gravity and energy. Titled On the Field of Gravity of a Point Mass in the Theory of Einstein, it became one of the pillars of modern relativistic studies and in it Schwarzschild presented his solutions to Einstein's unfinished equations. Shortly before his death in 1916, Schwarzschild completed his work and it was published later the same year. Two months after contracting a life threatening disease and being sent home to recuperate, Schwarzschild was finally able to concentrate on completing his calculations. Nonetheless, he was attracted to the essentialness of general relativity and began to seek exact answers for its equations. By the time he had read Einstein's papers, he had already seen action in Belgium, France and on the Russian front. Schwarzschild was also a German patriot, so he set aside his astronomical studies when World War 1 erupted and enlisted in the army. But he excelled in his abilities to deal with theoretical concepts and when Einstein's articles on general relativity were published in 1915, Schwarzschild was one of the first to recognize their importance. He pioneered new methods of studying spectra, for example. Schwarzschild was a practical individual by nature. However, the challenge did nothing to deter one of Einstein's contemporary astronomers- a theoretical physicist named Karl Schwarzschild. He was only able to approximate the solutions to his own equations and the math still perplexes even the best scientific brains. When Einstein developed relativity theory, it took him about ten years to work out the math using a daunting form of mathematics called tensor calculus. German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild calculated the first rigorous solution to the field equations in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity while serving on the Russian front during World War 1.
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