Everything You Wanted to Know About Astrophysics but Were Too Afraid to Ask

Distinguished guests and esteemed members of the society—I thank you for the opportunity to deliver the keynote address at this the 226^th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Many thanks to Michio Kaku for that flattering introduction. As you may or may not notice, I am not Stephen Hawking. My name is Oliver Obermann. Dr. Hawking asked me to speak on his behalf tonight regarding the minor issue of black hole radiation in Bose-Einstein condensates, with which I have a little personal experience. Forgive me if I defer all discussion of the mathematics to the end as I am not very good with numbers. I promise to keep my remarks to a minimum, as Neil deGrasse Tyson has informed me the conference auditorium must be cleared in thirty minutes for the annual meeting of the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention.

I first became aware of the existence of black holes during a speed-dating event last year. I don’t need to explain to members of this society the particulars of such an event. It was during speed-date round fourteen that I met Moira. After our third date Moira assured me she was not contagious. She was ill, but there was no reason to be alarmed. She could laugh, cry, kiss, pee, and carry on with her life for now. But her prognosis was bleak. I ran through a list of possible diseases in my head: flu, typhoid, hepatitis, malaria, leprosy . . . what? Did she have the plague? I must admit, I was aroused. And a little nervous. Most of the women I date are boring. They have nice teeth and love their mothers. They don’t have Moira’s wry sense of humor. For an ill person she looked fantastic.

This is awkward, she said. I’ve never told anyone what’s wrong with me.

Go ahead, you can tell me anything, I said, which was an obvious lie because it had only been two dates and I wasn’t ready for anything.

Moira confessed she was collapsing. Not from adrenal failure or cancerous growths. This wasn’t fatigue. This was not some psychobabble about the disenfranchisement of women within the laboring classes, she insisted. She was collapsing into herself. It’s subatomic, Moira said. Gravity is pressing in and thermodynamics is pressing out.

You mean, like science? I wondered. I told her I worked demolition on a night crew.

Moira said that according to her best calculations, the struggle in her body between gravity pulling in and radiation pushing out would shortly end as all her matter collapsed into a concentrated point no bigger than a fleck of dust. It was possible there would be a supernova. But then total blackness. That was her official diagnosis: collapsarus humanitas singularitus.

I’m becoming a black hole, Moira said.

You might find it hard to believe, but it is the first clinical observation of its kind.

Later, when we were in bed together, Moira showed me where the black hole had started to form. It was on her shoulder. It looked like a freckle.

That’s it?

That’s it, she said.

What can I say, my fellow scientists? Black holes are incredibly disappointing.

She said she had an itch one morning. An itch that didn’t go away. Then it felt like a lump. She went to the doctor. Her mother had died of cancer. But this wasn’t cancer, the doctor said. He didn’t know what it was. After reviewing the lab work he told her to consult with a physicist.

Her insurance didn’t cover the university hospital, so she ended up at a community college. The physicist was a little annoyed. Then Moira started taking off her shirt and said she was going to show him something he had never seen before. That got his attention and he was less grumpy.

Another round of tests showed that around the freckle was a high concentration of nitrogen and helium and traces of hydrogen cyanide. Star stuff, he called it. What did that mean? Moira wanted to know. The physicist said a black hole was the only logical explanation.

Will it hurt? she asked.

Theoretically? No, the physicist said. You might feel some tearing as space and time stretch. We call it spaghettification.

I like spaghetti, Moira said.

The physicist shook his head and said science is wasted on the wrong people.

I wasn’t sure if I believed Moira’s story. She was a nice girl, but a black hole? I had dated crazy but nothing like this. Still, it was a fantasy I could not resist.

It’s no big deal, Moira told me the next morning as she got on her clothes. Sooner or later we’re all eclipsed, right? C’est la vie.

I wasn’t sure that was the time to start thinking like the French. While Moira worked at the bakery I wrote a letter to Stephen Hawking.

DEAR MR. HAWKING. I KNOW YOU’RE TERRIBLY BUSY, BUT I HAVE A QUESTION. IT IS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. IS THERE ANY WAY TO COEXIST WITH A BLACK HOLE? THANK YOU. YOURS IN SCIENTIFIC SOLIDARITY, OLIVER OBERMANN.

I’m happy to report to the society we tried to forget science and make this romance work. Moira and I were inseparable. Our relationship was all light and no shadow. We took walks around town. We kissed in the rain. When I came home from the construction site she was waiting for me and when she came home from the bakery I was waiting for her.

But the seriousness of her condition manifested almost immediately. Nobody else noticed, but I did. It was little things. Her back hunched. Her knees buckled. She complained of heart palpitations and muscle spasms. Customers didn’t come to the bakery interested in coffee and orange rolls. No, she was a bottomless pit for all their venting, for all their secrets. I told her I could be her anchor, tethering her to the atomic scaffolding of our lives.

Now, I won’t bore you with the math of how black holes consume dust and gas at a rate conforming to Velikov’s electrothermal instability theorem, but understand that Moira was no different. She knew her time was limited and she was trying to soak up the world before it slipped away, before it collapsed in on her. She said there was too much. Too many books to read, too much food to taste, too much virtuality to process, too many indigenous tribes not yet discovered, too many cats to save from alleys. It made her head hurt, like when she was five and she ate too much ice cream.

They had it right all those years ago, she said. The world is too much with us. There is too much to know and not enough time.

Despite what the doctors and physicists told her about her painless termination, Moira worried. She had always wanted to be a mother, but not like this. Black holes swallow galaxies. What if I swallow the world? Think about it, she told me as she paced the room. What if this is the end of poverty, chocolate, public libraries, the Electoral College, long walks on the beach? What if we lose it all, Oliver? How can I live with myself if I give birth to that loss?

She punched the wall. It left a hole the size of her fist.

That won’t happen, I lied. I won’t let it happen.

What can you do, Oliver? What can any of us do?

Now, I know we are men of science gathered here, so I’m a little embarrassed to admit I dabbled in the humanities to comfort Moira. We hugged. I told her there was still time. We could get married. Maybe love is a transformative physics that operates outside the laws of quantum mechanics.

No, it’s useless, Moira said. This is all we are now. You stretching one way and me another.

My fellow scientists: that is romance. Sooner or later we’ll all be alone, stretched too thin and staring at what used to be the edge of our lives. We just need a physicist to do the math to prove it.

That night we fell asleep together. The next day Moira was gone.

It didn’t take long to find what was left of her. I took one look at the hole on the wall and I knew it was her. Her collapsing was complete. Somehow she had not burst into a supernova and swallowed all the pain and love and happy birthdays and goodbyes as she feared. This is the way her world ended: stretched too thin to be anything else but a hole.

I got very close to the hole without being too close. I had read all about the event horizon. I knew my limits. I loved Moira, but I wasn’t ready to be a part of her.

The hole emitted no odor. No synchrotron radiation, no nitrogen. No Schrodinger’s cat, so somebody tell Polyakov to rescind his paper. It looked very familiar to the freckle Moira had on her shoulder. Moira, I whispered. Moira, can you hear me? Can you understand me? Will you give me a sign it’s you? There was an echo trapped inside, almost like a hiccup. I couldn’t tell what the echo was saying. It sounded like Moira, but I wasn’t sure. The more I listened wanting to believe it was her the more I felt my insides tearing in two directions, hollowing me out like a bowl.

I thought about running out the door and never coming back. Maybe Moira was right. Maybe it was useless. Then I saw the postcard on the countertop. It was from Stephen Hawking. The picture on the postcard was of the Milky Way. The candy bar, not the galaxy, because, if you don’t know already, Stephen is a real ass. On the back of the postcard, scribbled in lousy penmanship was the answer to my question.

DEAR OLIVER. IT IS THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE, BUT SO IS EVERYTHING.

BEST OF LUCK. STEPHEN.

I decided not to leave. What good would that have done? Sure, you can run away from women, even love, but never science.

I made dinner for the black hole that night. Spaghetti with meatballs. I tied the meatballs to long strings of pasta and tried to throw them inside the hole from the other side of the room. Like fishing. I tried to pretend we were together again, but the future seemed out of reach. There was only the past and the present was being stretched in too many directions. Part of me knew she was not coming back, part of me knew I had to let her go. We had passed the event horizon of our relationship. It was only a matter of time before I would forget. Still, I could not leave her.

I stayed with the hole day and night. I kept it company. I fooled myself into thinking I could make this relationship work. And yes, for those of you already thinking it: there are things you can do with a black hole you can’t with a regular woman, but this is hardly the place to discuss such affairs of the heart.

In the beginning the black hole was timid in my presence. She shrunk down to the size of a coin, trying to disappear from my sight. Over time she became comfortable with my presence. She was a marvel, expanding and contracting on a whim, inviting me and refusing me, but always seducing me. She was all echo and void, a bottomless pit who seemed indifferent to me. She was nothing inside—she had no center, no core—but it was always an attractive emptiness, always out of reach, always at the point of something. In a way I am ashamed to admit, I loved Moira more this way—as absence rather than presence.

Other times it was just a hole on a crumbling wall.

Eventually we drifted apart. We were in different spaces now, emotionally more than physically. I had tried to take the relationship to the next level, summoning the courage to walk past the event horizon and crawl inside the hole. My fellow scientists, it was strange. I did not feel myself stretched like spaghetti. I did not feel time stand still on the head of a pin. I could only feel emptiness as it slowly evaporated back into the universe.

When I regained my senses I was lying on the floor. I stared at the hole as it continued collapsing until becoming just another invisible crack on the wall.

When I’m not lecturing astrophysicists on all the things they misunderstand about the universe, sometimes I still work the demolition crew. I like to level buildings. I like to dig foundation pits. Sometimes I just grab a sledgehammer for no reason at all and just start swinging. When I see a crack on the sidewalk I’ll wedge a few fingers inside so it does not have to feel so lonely. If I see a rabbit hole I get close to it, wondering if I’ll feel Moira’s absence. It is all so fragile but nothing I do, nothing any one of us does, makes any real difference. Science will keep being science. Whether it’s a pothole in the street or the ozone in the sky, we keep making holes because we want to reach inside them, grasping for lost horizons in a constant search for the other end of nothing.