
Black Holes
I don’t understand black holes, and neither do you. I don’t care how many shots you’ve had and how confident you’re feeling; you do not understand black holes.
Black holes are the most powerful known things in the universe, capable of ripping stars apart into the sum of their atoms. A black hole is an area of space-time of such immense gravity that not even light can escape from it, so we can only perceive it visually as a sphere of blackness. They are formed when really massive stars die, and their cores collapse under their own tremendous gravity into a single, infinitely small containing a huge mass called a ‘singularity’. The gravity of the singularity at the centre is so strong, you have to be travelling faster than the speed of light to escape the gravitational pull, which is impossible. The after you pass the point of no return close to a black hole, or the ‘event horizon’, you’ll disappear inside.
Or maybe you won’t disappear. In reality, nobody knows what happens on the other side – you go beyond an observable point in space-time, so if we want to know what’s going on inside, we have to be willing to never come back, which kind of defeats the point. Black holes remain one of the biggest mysteries in science today. Time operates differently around a black hole. Ever watch Interstellar? It’s that film where they talk about time dilation of black holes, and all the critics gave it five stars so people didn’t think that they didn’t understand it (because they absolutely didn’t understand it).
Also, black holes are spinning so fast that they morph space and time itself, creating a region of space-time called the Ergosphere, which is equally as confusing as black holes. And they potentially disassemble or destroy information, which scientists previously thought impossible.
So I say again: I don’t understand black holes, and neither do you. Not even after another shot.