Revisiting the Black Hole

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.