After Albert Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity in 1915, which greatly

improved the Newtonian description of gravity, the arena was quiet for a long time. The
eminent physicists of the time, such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin
Schrodinger, and others were mainly busy with quantum mechanics. Einstein himself
spent the last few decades of his life trying to unify gravity with other forces of nature,
such as the electric and magnetic fields, but without any glimpse of success
whatsoever.

There were few remarkable exceptions though. One of these was a classic research by
Robert Oppenheimer of the atomic bomb fame, and his student Herbert Snyder,
published in 1939. Their work used the Einstein’s equations of gravity to study the
collapse of a massive star, when it undergoes a sudden shrinkage under the pull of its
own gravity on exhausting its internal nuclear fuel.  They predicted that the outcome of
this collapse, as implied by Einstein’s theory of gravity, is a space-time singularity: An
infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, ordinarily not encountered in any
of our usual experiences of the physical world.

Most interestingly, Einstein himself strongly opposed such an idea and conclusion. In
1939 itself, he wrote a paper suggesting that a star will never meet such a final fate of
becoming a singularity that Oppenheimer and Snyder found, and that it must settle into
an equilibrium of a finite sized star. Later, it was found that like many other mistakes he
made, this was another such error that Einstein committed, and the star collapse and
singularity would happen for sure