![]() The reason, he said, was that black holes shed particles and radiate energy - a phenomenon that came to be known as “Hawking radiation.” And this conclusion meant that rather than being voids producing nothing at all - as physicists had long thought - black holes actually glow. Hawking showed that black holes can actually shrink. Drawing once again from Einstein’s equations, he and Penrose showed that 13.8 billion years ago the universe emerged violently from a single compressed point no bigger than an atom. Hawking also helped confirm the Big Bang theory. In the 1960s, Hawking and fellow British physicist Roger Penrose built on Einstein’s theories to describe the physical characteristics of black holes and showed that when a star collapses it forms an infinitely dense point called a singularity - the birth of a black hole. The term black hole itself wasn’t coined until the 1960s, when scientists began to realize that Einstein’s math actually described real objects - gaping abysses of raw gravitational force so powerful that they suck in dust, gas, and stars and stop light itself from escaping. Most astronomers now believe that black holes lie at the center of most, if not all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way.īut at the time of Hawking’s birth in 1942, black holes were little more than a mathematical quirk - a prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity. Because writing, in all spaces unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all.The first black hole was discovered in 1971, and we now believe that 100 million or so are sprinkled across the universe. ![]() Because truth, that illusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there. Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression. Because the world is reinvented every day and this is how it is done. Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow upon (it must be said) no surface. Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretentions. Because of all arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men. Because in the beginning was the gesture and in the end the come, as well in between what we have are words. Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood. Because in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious, and because in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life. Because God, created in the storyteller's image, can be destroyed only by its maker. Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks. Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child. Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it. Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world. Because fiction imitates life's beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks. Because epitaphs well struck give Death, our vorcious master, heartburn. Because Death, our mirthless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs. Because as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes) it passes the time. Because art's lie is preferable, in truth, to life's beautiful terror. And darkness illumination: for, as dragons are also called worms, so black hole are known as wormholes, offering a mystical and intimate pathway to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, thus bring light as they consume it.”īecause art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order. Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Though cons of teasing play may be granted the doomed, ultimately play turns to prey and all are sucked haplessly―brilliantly aglow, true, but oh so briefly so―into the fire-breathing maw of oblivion. Once having entered the tumultuous orbit of a black hole, nothing can break away from its passionate but fatal embrace. “Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close.
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