3/23/2023 0 Comments Black hole movie![]() ![]() Obliging physicists soon began to speculate about the possibility of avoiding destruction within a black hole. Early examples of stories in which they perform this function tend, in order to obscure the fundamental problem, to use fudge-names for them: George R R Martin's "The Second Kind of Loneliness" (December 1972 Analog) speaks of a "nullspace vortex" while Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (June 1972-January 1975 Analog fixup 1974) refers to "collapsars". Because this property of black holes offered an apparent means of dodging the relativistic limitations on getting around the Universe at Faster-than-Light speeds, they quickly began to crop up as "star gates" – rapid transit systems – as in Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen ( 1980). It was independently and for different reasons hypothesized by cosmologists and sf writers alike that – supposing one could travel through a black hole – the point of emergence might be far removed from the point of entry. At first it seemed that anything falling into a black hole was destined for certain destruction, but this narrative inconvenience was frequently sidestepped. The idea proved, however, to be surprisingly adaptable. Familiarity bred contentment if not contempt, and the black hole was soon domesticated by sf writers into a standard image of no great moment. ![]() John Taylor's Black Holes: The End of the Universe? ( 1973), one of several books which helped to popularize the notion in the 1970s, is a rather eccentric ideative rhapsody built on the debatable supposition that "the black hole requires a complete rethinking of our attitudes to life".įurther tense psychological melodramas using black holes to develop analogies between extraordinary physics and mental processes include Robert Silverberg's "To the Dark Star" (in The Farthest Reaches, anth 1968, ed Joseph Elder), Barry N Malzberg's Galaxies ( 1975) and John Varley's "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" (in Orbit 19, anth 1977, ed Damon Knight) – which features an intelligent black hole – but stories of this kind soon petered out. Few other notions have had such an immediate imaginative impact, or spawned so many exercises in lyrical quasi-scientific philosophizing. These stories make interesting metaphorical connections between physics and psychology, perhaps helping to cast some light on the intriguing question of why the black-hole concept became one of the most charismatic ideas in late twentieth-century physics. Many early sf stories dealing with the theme seized upon the extreme relativistic time-dilation effect associated with objects falling towards the event horizons of such holes examples include Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" (in The Farthest Reaches, anth 1968, ed Joseph Elder), Brian W Aldiss's "The Dark Soul of the Night" (in The Ides of Tomorrow, anth 1976, ed Terry Carr) and Frederik Pohl's Gateway ( 1977). The latter is defined by the distance from the singularity at which the escape velocity is that of light the name "event horizon" derives from the fact that it is of course impossible to observe from outside any events occurring closer to the singularity than this. It was not until the 1960s, however, that physicists began to speculate as to whether a collapsing star of sufficient mass, something over three times that of the Sun, might pass beyond even the Neutron-Star state of collapsed matter to become a black hole of this kind, centred on a singularity (a limiting point where the asymptotic approach to infinite gravity crushes matter and energy entirely out of existence) and bounded by an event horizon. It was resuscitated in the twentieth century when the implications of General Relativity became clear. ![]() The possibility that a lump of matter might be compressible to the point at which its surface gravity would be so powerful that not even light could escape from it was first pointed out in the late eighteenth century by John Michell (1723-1793) and then by Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827). The scientific element of the present discussion has been much simplified. ![]() The concept of the black hole is quite complex, and is best approached by the layman through a reliable book of scientific popularization such as A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes ( 1988) by Stephen W Hawking (1942-2018), one of the theoretical physicists to have done fundamental work on the concept. The term was coined by the physicist John A Wheeler (1911-2008) in 1969 and adopted immediately and enthusiastically by sf writers. Item of sf Terminology borrowed from Cosmology. ![]()
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