18th century NORMALITY:

http://admin.wadsworth.com/resource_...Ch01-Essay.pdf
Clifford Will, "THE RENAISSANCE OF GENERAL RELATIVITY": "The first
glimmerings of the black hole idea date to the 18th century, in the
writings of a British amateur astronomer, the Reverend John Michell.
Reasoning on the basis of the corpuscular theory that light would be
attracted by gravity, he noted that the speed of light emitted from
the surface of a massive body would be reduced by the time the light
was very far from the source. (Michell of course did not know special
relativity.)"

21st century LUNACY:

http://space.newscientist.com/articl...star-size.html
"But light from the disc also loses energy - and is shifted to longer,
redder wavelengths - because it has to work hard to escape the
gravitational pull of the dense neutron star. This effect, called
gravitational redshift, is predicted by Einstein's theory of general
relativity, which posits that gravity bends the fabric of space-time."

Pentcho Valev