| 释义 |
black-hole, black hole
(Beside obvious application to any dark hole or deep cell:)
1. Mil. The punishment cell or lock-up in a barracks; the guard-room. (The official designation till 1868.)
(The name has become historic, in connexion with the horrible catastrophe in 1756 at the black hole of the barracks in Fort William, Calcutta, into which 146 Europeans were thrust for a whole night, of whom only 23 survived till the morning.)
1758J. Z. Holwell Black Hole Calcut. 8 The guard..ordered us to go into the room at the southernmost end of the barracks, commonly called the Black-Hole prison. 1758J. Blake Plan Mar. Syst. 49 What happened lately in the black-hole at Bengal. 1816C. James Milit. Dict., Black-hole, a place in which soldiers may be confined by the commanding officer..In this place they are generally restricted to bread and water. 1844Regul. & Ord. Army 121 Confinement to the Black Hole..to be reserved for cases of Drunkenness, Riot, Violence, or Insolence to Superiors. 1868Ibid. ⁋789 note, The term lock up room and black hole is to be abolished.
2. gen. A place of confinement for punishment. (Often with allusion to that at Calcutta.)
1831A. Watts House-Hunt., The bed-chambers (the black-holes of her establishment). 1848Thackeray Van. Fair ii, Do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to the black hole?
3. The deep dark pool under a waterfall; as ‘the Black Hole at Aira Force.’
4. Astr. (As two words.) A region within which the gravitational field is so strong that no form of matter or radiation can escape from it except by quantum-mechanical tunnelling, and thought to result from the collapse of a massive star; also fig.
1968J. A. Wheeler in Amer. Scientist LVI. 9 Light and particles incident from outside emerge and go down the black hole only to add to its mass and increase its gravitational attraction. 1971,1974[see s.v. Schwarzschild 2]. 1977Sci. Amer. Jan. 34/3 A black hole weighing a billion tons..would have a radius of about 10-13 centimeter. 1978Pasachoff & Kutner University Astron. xii. 326 Once matter is inside a black hole, it loses its identity in the sense that from outside a black hole, all we can tell is the mass of the black hole, the rate at which it is spinning, and what electric charge it has. 1980Time 16 June 64 To the 1.7 million people added to the jobless rolls in April and May, the U.S. economy may well seem to have..been sucked into a black hole. 1986Nature 8 May 111/1 Quantum mechanics allows a particle to tunnel out of a black hole... Eventually it evaporates to such a small size that the semiclassical approximation becomes invalid, and quantum mechanics must be applied to the gravitational field of the black hole itself.
Hence black-hole v., to confine to the black-hole.
1866Pall Mall. G. 9 He was blackholed for twelve hours. |