Black Holes Are Nasty

Black Holes Are Nasty

Or maybe this isn’t a black hole and I’m headed toward a naked singularity. Near a singularity, casualty could be violated, effects could precede causes, time could flow backward, and you were unlikely to survive, much less remember the experience.

For a rotating black hole, Elie dredged up from her studies years before, there as not a point but a ring singularity or something still more complex to be avoided. Black holes are nasty. The gravitational tidal forces were so great that you would be stretched into a long this thread if you were so careless as to fall in. You would also be crushed laterally.

Through the gray transparent surfaces that were now the ceiling and floor, she could see a great flurry of activity. The organosilicate matrix was collapsing on itself in some places and unfolding in others; the embedded erbium dowels were spinning and tumbling. Everything inside the dodec looked quite ordinary.

A giant planet. Black Holes are the most exciting mystery in the Universe. Image: © Elena

The pentagonal panels of the dodecahedron had become transparent. Above and below she could make out the organosilicate lacework and the implanted erbium dowels, which seemed to be stirring. All three benzels had disappeared. The dodecahedron plunged, racing down a long dark tunnel just broad enough to permit its passage. There was a texture to the tunnel walls, from which Elie could sense their speed. The patterns were irregular softedged mottlings, nothing with a well-defined form. The walls were not memorable for their appearance, only for their functions.

Every now and then a forward vertex of the dodecahedron would brush the wall, and flakes of an unknown material would be scraped off. The dodec itself seemed unaffected. The faint yellow lighting was diffuse, uniform.

Back holes were either primordial – made during the origin of the universe – or produced in a later epoch by the collapse of a star more massive than the Sun. Then, the gravity would be so strong that – except for quantum effects – even light could not escape, although the gravitational field certainly would remain. Hence “black’, hence “holes”.

But the black holes didn’t collapse a star, and she couldn’t see any way in which they had captured a primordial black hole.