Just by thinking on such a grand scale, humanity not only enlarges its universe but expands and ennobles itself. Perhaps the ideal metaphor is not Piglet’s Heffalump but Browning’s famous declamation: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?” To the growing fraternity of black-hole theorists, that cosmic vision is the ultimate lodestar.
—“Those Baffling Black Holes,” Time
“YOU CAN CALL THEM Great Big Old Nothings all you want,” says Mrs. Vern Wike of Baruma, Michigan, “but when that thing came along and seized me up by the clavicles and turned me into a grain of dust five or six times and set me down fourteen miles from my home, it did me a world of good. I feel like a new old lady.”
“Idea I got, it was trying to tell me something, trying to, you know, to communicate,” says Roster Toombs of Fillings, Maryland, who maintains that a black hole reached him in his garage apartment, transferred him to at least two other universes and left him with “kind of more perspective on life than I can use.”
Ex-President Jimmy Carter is interested in black holes.
Sings Benno Zane II in his black hole-inspired pop hit “So-uh Dark”:
You-uh so profound,
Grand Canyon like a levee.
Billion tons-uh like a pound,
You-uh so heavy.
Yeah so-uh dark in there
You got Noah’s ark in there?
But the hole is greater than some of its poets. From Slippery Key, Florida, to Bosco, Washington, from England’s Cambridge University to cooperative observatories on mainland China, mankind is going further than it ever imagined possible with thoughts of black holes, those mysterious antiwombs of collapsed stars in which time and space are so warped that they gasp, enclose themselves and become nothing; the speed of light is just nothing, flat; and as for matter, it is spaghettied-out, shamed and compressed into a nothingness billions and billions of times smaller—and more potent—than it was when it was something.
To some theorists, a black hole admits no escape. Under special circumstances, others argue, it may transpose things into another universe or back in time as far as, for instance, the Hoover administration, via passages dubbed “wormholes.” One school of thought posits phenomena dubbed “white holes” (which spew out nothing instead of ingesting it), but these—as anyone can understand who has watched both “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train”—have laid a lesser claim on the imagination. The possibility of a “yellow hole,” in which everything is sunny and visitors find themselves robed in buttercups, is generally dismissed as wishful thinking.
So what kind of thinking is right? Even the savants wonder. When Sir Waring Tifit created the first mathemo-mechanical model of a black hole in 1964, famed Astrophysicist Vivien Soule took one look and exclaimed, “This is so dense that thought must become like Thousand Island dressing, or petroleum jelly or something, and time become u.s. news and world report.”
The distinguished Pure Mathematician Seiji Kamara took one look and observed, “This is so dense that the birds must leave off their singing and crawl like little bugs upon the ground. It’s not the blackness so much, it’s the density.”
Little Joey Fulks, the brilliant if ill-focused graduate student who later withdrew into market research, took one look and said, “This is so dense it makes me want to shriek.”
The great Rabinrasha Charawansary took two looks and said, “I don’t think it is so dense.” But that was just Charawansary. He also didn’t think Kamara’s mathematics were so pure. Later that same evening, at a faculty cookout in his back yard, Charawansary reasoned aloud about black holes so deeply that his mind evidently passed into one. Because of relativistic effects, he appeared to observers to be forever nearly coming to a point but always more and more slowly and never quite. To Charawansary himself, he seemed to have summed up magnificently, in one great flash while burning a wiener, and everyone else was just sitting there like sacks of wheat. In fact, the phenomenon Charawansary presented was so extremely trying a thing to observe that all of his colleagues had murmured months ago that they had better be getting along, leaving him with Mrs. Charawansary, who was disconsolate until a troupe of quantum mechanics came through town and showed her some models of what goes on inside the atom that made her laugh and laugh.
Can a person become a black hole? Not likely, believe most theorists. But just say someone were to. What if? His knees would in effect become his respiration … his past, future and sense of smell would be telescoped into an infinitesimal pelletlike item. … and he would literally be worn by his own shoes. In earthly geographical terms, an area the size of Maine, Asia and the city of Detroit and environs would be squeezed into a single copy of the New York Post.
All airy speculation? Not so, insist some of today’s brightest young stars of physics and math. “Oh, the holes are there, for sure,” says Caltech’s Flip Kensil. “It ain’t no big thing. Could be there’s one of “infinitesimal magnitude coursing within a hair’s breadth of your face right now powerful enough to swallow human life and the federal bureaucracy. But hey, that’s the universe all over.”
A “singularity” is what scientists tend to dub a black hole in the scientific papers that they read to each other. A “singularity.” These scientists! They don’t give much away, do they?
The state of the art of black-hole thought is enough, in short, to tempt the layman to throw up his or her hands. But that would be defeatism—and in fact many laymen are doing anything but.
Fulpus Wsky and Livianne Wills of the Yale-Rockefeller Institute for Astrophysics believe that public enthusiasm for black holes is such that the holes may well be in our own homes, in some form, before the turn of the century. “When we happen to mention at a cocktail party that at any moment we might receive in the pit of our stomach a golf ball the ‘size’ of a million suns,” note Wsky-Wills, “people’s heads turn our way instantly.”
All very well, humanity’s ever practical side will counter, but what is in the hole for us? The answers to that question are by no means clear. A black hole, if harnessed, would be of undeniable value in trash removal and national defense. But so far the principal benefit derived is a sense of elation, of expansion, even of pride, gained by those hardy reflectives, in science and out, who make a level effort to comprehend the concept. Black Hole Clubs, NOTHING IS BEAUTIFUL buttons and “singularity bars” are springing up. In many parts of the country, black-hole mental-picturing sessions are replacing wet-T-shirt contests in popularity.
Not all of these “holeys,” as the trendier enthusiasts dub themselves, rise to the gravity of the phenomenon. Misfits, many of them, acting out compulsions that are psychological at bottom and may have little or nothing to do with nothingness itself. These people, it may be, tend to cheapen the hole thing—but under our laws they have the right to think about what they please, as they please; and that includes the laws of nature.
And in the end, who can readily say which response to black holes is authentic and which is not? Who can say that the Toombses and the Mrs. Wikes of this world are real zeros? Who can say—although we may know what a black hole is—what a black hole is like? Not the experts.
“‘Like.’ Oh, it can’t be likened to anything,” says Rocky Top Observatory’s Bern Rogovin. “It’s … different from anything. It’s—I wouldn’t say opposite—it’s … Oh, what’s the word?”
Antimatter?
“No, not that. Yet definitely not matter. I would say, perhaps … amatter.”
What’s amatter?
“Oh, nothing.”