Infinite Jen's Reviews > Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy

There are some advantages to growing up very southern. In addition to being born with impressive trigger discipline, you squirrel away an arsenal of colloquialisms to fall back on in times of befuddlement or great stress. Case in point: When your effete boyfriend, decides he’s had enough of the cloistered life of a scribe, and begins to masquerade as a man. To wit: laboring with a spare tire on the side of the road in the dead of winter for hours. You grow concerned, step out of the car, and say: “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass in Idaho out here. Want me to help you with that, darlin?” Not to be emasculated by the object of his affections, he dismisses you and attacks a lug-nut with revitalized purpose.

“Bless your cotton socks.” You say.

Sensing an opportunity to stake out the narrow band of human accomplishment that has defined his academic life, he rises, doffing his chapeau, he carefully intones: “I think your idiom is all wrong here.”

Snatching the tire iron away from him you say: “It’s a sorry excuse for a functional intellect that don’t know a fulcrum from his asshole. Say that highfalutin shit to me again and we’re finished, Reginald!”

“I...” He stammers.

“So help me GOD, if you bring up Heidegger right now, I will knock a turd outta you that’ll whizz like a wire-nail!”

Sufficiently chastened he goes back to work. You get back into the car, slamming the door, and putting some Hank on to soothe your savage soul. Another hour passes and you glance out the window to see Reginald writhing on the ground, making obscene snow angels, muttering about pure reason’s ability to count a horse’s teeth before it opens its mouth. Seizing the opportunity to gloat, you step out of the vehicle and loom over the poor bastard like the shadow of death. In a voice that would make a snowman shiver, you say: “Where’s your post structuralism now?”

We’re getting way off track here right out of the gate. My question is: Have you ever, while searching for the perfect way to capture the effect a book had on you, said: “It’s enough to knock a slop-hound offa gut-wagon.”? Did the shockwave of its profundity reduce all chatter at the dinner table to nothingness? Did someone come up to you afterwards, nursing their cocktail, and proceed to compliment your unique vernacular? Did you then reply acidly: “It’s been a dream of mine to choke someone to death with the laryngeal nerve of a giraffe.”? Well, I’m not sure what that says about your inclination to read this book, and you’re starting to develop an odd obsession with giraffes, but let me take a moment to explain to you how badass Black Holes are. There’s a few kinds, but here are two:

CHADS are really big stars, who inevitably get fed up with the monotonous routine of fusing hydrogen into helium, which prompts CHADS to shake it up a bit and try some heavier elements. But they come to the horrifying realization that it’s turtles all the way down. At which point CHADS say: “It’s enough to make a billy goat puke!” And go on the awfullest self destructive spree you’ve ever seen. Tearing up the stellar neighborhood like right bastards, before exiting so dramatically from the scene that they punch a damn hole in the fabric of space-time.

TIMS are smaller fellas who are just fucking fed up with everything, they’re sick to death of the whole game, and they’re trying to quit drinking. But they’ve got a friend that’s constantly hanging around them and handing them shots. They’re the ultimate enabler: BILLS (a binary star). The whole time TIMS are pleading with BILLS: “I gotta quit this shit. If I should have a few more hydrogen-sours; I’m gonna overcome my electron degeneracy pressure and go on a real tear, BILL. A real goddamn tear.” But BILLS don’t give a shit and just keep egging TIMS on until, as suggested, they go on a hellacious tear and rip space-time’s breeches.

In both cases, these catastrophic events create what are known as Singularities, and the thing about ‘em is; you ain’t even allowed to look at ‘em. See, light ain’t even fast enough to outrun the gravitation of a Black Hole, (that’s why it’s black!) but light is overconfident (because it’s a cosmic speed limit, and that gives it the big-head) and it’s always trying its damndest to give it a go. So you got this circle of light delineating the outer edges of a Black Hole, where light is sprinting with everything it has, but like a kid being held by her suspenders, it’s just running in place. That’s a warning my friend, you cross that line and something so horrible happens to you that physicists had to make a term up for it. It’s called Spaghettification. I ain’t joking. Look it up. Anyway, it’s presumably unpleasant as all hell, but probably pretty brief as far as unpleasant as hell things go.

Now here’s an interesting thing about TIMS, since they always get a certain amount of booze in them before they go swarpin' about, we know their peak luminosity, and since we know from some big brains that the intensity of light falls off with the square of the distance, we do something nifty with it. If we know an object’s absolute brightness we can calculate how far away it is based on how dim it is when it arrives at our light collectors. Now there are some further complications to this, but I ain’t gonna get into that. That’s what this book is for. Anyway, they’re damn handy.

One more thing before I go that’ll make you shit through the eye of a needle without touching the sides: At the center of our galaxy is a Black Hole that’s all the time going off on the most destructive row you’ve ever seen in your life. LENNY here has a mass about 4 million times that of our sun. And he don’t stop for nothing. Beats the piss outta TIMS, and BILLS, and JOEYS, and FRANKS, and CHADS. And he don’t stop at giving them a concussion. He EATS the bastards!