1974

Hawking radiation

• A black hole by definition
• is an object so massive
• that it sucks in everything nearby
• including its own light.
• But there in space it sits,
• a perfect black body, reflecting nothing,
• so Stephen Hawkings said,
• like any other black body,
• a black hole is not a dead end,
• but has a temperature related to its mass
• and would gradually dissipate
• if other masses manage to avoid it.

Counter intuitive

• Mathematics frees us from being limited
• to what we already expect.
• It isn’t limited to what we already know,
• showing truths we cannot otherwise foresee.
• Yakov Zeldovich and Alexei Starobinsky
• told Stephen Hawking that rotating black holes
• should emit particles, but when Hawkings did the math
• he found that all black holes emit radiation.

Small black holes

• Small black holes
• form and eventually dissipate,
• even though scientists at CERN
• have been unable to create them.
• That could be funny, because
• they are all too obvious
• when you know where to look.
• Failures, heartbreaks, deaths
• puncture the fabric of normality.
• Without grace, they suck us in.
• Some holes, after their creation,
• grow by absorbing things that matter,
• consuming lives.
• Others wax and wane like the moon
• and, if we wait and wish enough,
• eventually disappear.