Living with Our Own Black Hole
There's a black hole in our apartment. Black holes are created when stars implode. Nothing escapes. Nothing is ever seen again. First, it was my black skirt. Then, my black sweater. My black electronic organizer. But it wasn't until my shoes got swallowed up, that I truly became concerned. I kid you not. Every last pair of shoes (most of which are black), except for my dear sneakers (which are not black) are gone. Granted, I moved them somewhere for safekeeping one day when I was cleaning. But certainly, I didn't anticipate never seeing them again.
Last week, my (black) pager.
It gets weirder. Sam approached me the other day looking ashen. The (beige) string on his yo-yo, it seems, has mysteriously gotten shorter. A lot shorter. But wasn't gone entirely. Could the color have had anything to do with it? Naaaaaaa
In looking for a logical answer, we looked at our cats. Naaaaa.
Then, I looked at the cats again. What if the black hole swallows them up while we're out? Naaaa.
They are black and grey/brown. I think they are safe. Besides, they'd annoy the heck out of everything else in the hole.
The good news about all this is that I have become significantly less attached to my stuff. Of course, if Sam were to get swallowed up, I might get a tad testy.
What clued Sam and me into this Black Hole theory was an amazing movie we rented from the Library. "A Brief History of Time" is the story of Stephen Hawking and the origins of the universe. Oh, and Black Holes, of course. In case you don't know, Hawking is the most brilliant mind alive today. This man's story is uplifting to the extreme. In his 20s, he was stricken with ALS (a motor neuron disease) and given two years to live. That was in the late 60s. Today, he has only the use of a couple of fingers, with which he selects words from an elaborate computer system and sends them to a speech synthesizer. Despite all of this, he has been a prolific writer, brilliant teacher, and turned the world of sub-atomic physics on its head. You can find out more about this amazing man at his web site - http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/hawking/home.html.
If you have children, I cannot encourage you enough to watch the movie with them. This movie challenges us on so many levels, not the least of which is observing the miraculous spirit and humor of this man, a man with such brilliance imprisoned in the "body of a cabbage."
Back to Black Holes. It seems that when you get sucked into one, time stops. In fact after watching this movie, you come to see that time is truly a where, rather than a when. From outside the Black Hole and looking at your watch as it approaches noon, time will slow down and the the hands on the watch will never reach noon. But if you are inside that hole, well, time will, at first, pass as usual. Problem is that time will begin to go faster and faster. You will see the future as the present. And here's the really unfortunate part, after about two weeks of falling into nothingness, you will start to stretch. Now, this may be good for those of us who need to adjust our weight to our height. Still, this stretching continues until it becomes more than a tad uncomfortable. In fact, it continues until we become just a few particles of matter, matter which just might make it out of the hole as radiation. In the meantime, it would be a great ride, so they say.
I actually e-mailed Mr. Hawking today because I had a great idea. Make a gigantic fishing pole. A reeeaaaalllly big one and attach it to a space shuttle. Attach a daring soul to the other end and dip her into the Black Hole. After about a week and a half of falling (after she's seen the future, but before she stretches too much), just reel her in! Voila! A witness to the greatest mystery of the universe! And a weight loss of at least twenty pounds! What more could you ask for?
AND, if we give the space traveler a REALLLLY big suitcase, I'll bet she could rescue all that stuff that got sucked in from my apartment and from your house too. Like all those single socks that used to be matched.
So the next time something mysteriously disappears from your home, don't think of it as a loss. Instead, be cheered by the contribution you have made to the grand scheme of the cosmos.
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