By T W Ladd 12/6/20

Black Holes – Not As Dirty As They Sound

            When trying to date things, scholars used to use the terms terminus post quem and terminus ante quem. And event of a thing had to come after (post) something, but it couldn’t have happened/existed prior (ante) to something else.

            I’m thinking of a time I came home to find my dad reading a National Geographic. Not only was he reading it, sitting in the sunshine just inside the sliding-glass door that opened on our deck, but he was engrossed in it.

            He said something like, “You boys won’t believe this, but …” and proceeded to read to us from the article. I don’t think anything like that had ever happened before.

            I know this event had to occur after I started second grade. The reason being that we never had a subscription to National Geographic. We got a small pile of them after my mom got the job as a librarian in my elementary school. She started when I was in second grade. And it happened prior to Christmas, 1979, when I was in fourth grade.

            I can be certain of that because that was when we saw The Black Hole in the theater. Over the same Christmas break we also saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Incidentally, that was the last movie my dad ever took us to. It may have been the last time my dad set foot in a theater. I’m not sure. I know he wasn’t impressed with either of those movies. I really liked The Black Hole but Star Trek made little sense to me and what did make sense was boring.

            The National Geographic in question was Volume 145, Number 5. May 1974. The article: “The Incredible Universe.” The topic: Black holes, of course.

            My dad was astonished to learn that stars could collapse under their own weight when their nuclear fuel was burned up, all of the hydrogen converted to helium. The outward pressure of the radiant heat had kept the core of the star from contracting, but once the hydrogen is gone, the star can explode. If it is sufficiently massive, all that’s left behind after the explosion of a supernova, is a black hole. The remaining core has collapsed due to its own gravity. It is now so densely packed, and its mass confined to such a small area, that its gravity traps everything that comes near it, including light. And this is why scientists call it a black hole.

            Is it a metric of how fascinated my dad was that I kept the magazine for years? That his enthusiasm rubbed off on me? I think this marks the beginning of my own obsession with space. Science was my favorite subject in fourth grade. The school library had a life-size plastic model of the human body’s vital organs. Although it had a really weird smell, I loved to take that thing apart and put it back together. My friend Heath and I were really into that. He was also into ’Salem’s Lot. I went over to his house one day after school. We played with all of his Star Wars action figures and talked about sneaking out at some point and going through the city graveyard a midnight. Heath said we needed to make wooden crosses out of popsicle sticks and memorize Psalm 23.

            Heath said we should become coroners. That would combine medical science along with criminal investigation, just like on Quincy.

            Heath Albertson was my best friend in fourth grade. He was head and shoulders taller than me. And he was quite “husky.” Kids called him Fat Albertson. He laughed it off and, honestly, I don’t think it gave him a moment of grief. Upon reflection, that can’t strictly be true. It must have caused him some pain, but he certainly didn’t show. He was loud, flamboyant, happy, and always cracking jokes. He was also smart and got excellent grades in every subject. But he spoke with a heavy lisp. Having the name Heath was perfect for a lisp. Being called Steve, for instance, would have caused more difficulties. He and I got to be friends because we both were in speech. I sometimes had a lisp when I was in second grade. By fourth grade I’m pretty sure it was gone. Heath never lost his lisp. I saw him when I was twenty and we exchanged pleasantries. He still had it then. I didn’t mind going to speech. We got to play Sorry and Stop, Thief! The latter being about the best board game ever.   

            The spring of 1980 I turned ten. It was kind of a personal Annus Mirabilis. For my birthday I begged my mom to buy me a chemistry set. It included a microscope. I think this kit sold for $10. The microscope was definitely the most attractive feature. It’s not like I knew anything about sulfur, sodium bicarbonate, or any of that other stuff. But that was the only way to get a microscope in the Penny’s catalog.

            It didn’t come with any pre-made slides. I had to find things to look at. I looked at strands of my own hair, which had to be plucked out since I didn’t use a hairbrush, and if there’s hair in your comb… Gross. I also bit my lip so I could look at some blood (at 40x magnification, blood isn’t that interest.) I figured that was safer than playing around with chicken blood or something else I might be able to find in the fridge. The strand of hair was pretty neat to look at. You can see the dark central shaft inside the hair follicle.

            Don’t worry, I never tried to dig anything out of my nose to look at it under magnification. I did have some standards.

            Heath was very impressed with my microscope. I took the kit to his house and his mom helped us do some tests with acids and bases. It’s funny that we didn’t know the term “science nerd.”

             And then the next Christmas I got the telescope. The first night the moon came up! It was sheer joy. Seeing those neatly round craters with such clarity! Thinking that there was nothing between Earth and the Moon for over 225,000 miles! All of that space is just utterly empty! The moon hangs in a sea of nothing. And so does the Earth. Both objects orbit the sun, which also hangs in the middle of empty space. The little book my parents gave me that Christmas, The Golden Guide to Stars, said the star nearest to our solar system was 4.2 light years away. That would be a long ride even in the Millennium Falcon.

            And what’s between here and there? Other than a few asteroids? Absolutely nothing. Infinitely empty space!

            How do you wrap your head around the concept of nothing? I couldn’t. And where there’s no gravity, the nothing has no effect on your movement. You don’t sink in nothing like you do water or air. That too was the pull of gravity.

            I spent a lot of time being puzzled by all of that. I also spent a lot of time reading through that little Stars book. Without realizing it, I memorized all kinds of facts about our solar system. But reading the book was just something to do when I couldn’t look at the Moon or some of the planets.

            Looking through a telescope at the partially-full Moon was an amazing experience. The fact that you had to almost continually inch the telescope along was both frustrating and part of the marvel. Everybody knows that the Moon moves. But looking at a small sliver of the sky through a fixed optical instrument shows you just how fast the Earth is spinning. Suddenly, I was aware of this dynamic, living relationship our planet has with our nearest space neighbor. We’re involved in a dance. You can know that by looking at the Moon at different times in the night. But you can’t feel the reality of the action without the fixed instrument. Naturally, your eye moves along with the Moon when you simply glance up. So, you get this impression of the whole thing being rather static. It’s like watching the sunrise of sunset over houses or trees. You can gauge the movement against those close objects. But once the celestial body is high above the horizon, there’s nothing to put the movement into perspective. You can fool yourself that time stands still.

            It’s very similar to standing near a large clock. On a wristwatch you can’t see the minute hand moving. But on a large clock you’re very aware that the minute hand is always plodding forward. Timepieces of very different sizes can give very different impressions of pieces of time.

            Another extremely fascinating thing to look at with a low-power telescope is the Sun. You do have to use a filter. If you put the dark glass up to your eye, you can see nothing – unless you’re aimed directly at our nearest star. I suppose it’s the same material in a welder’s mask. When used in a telescope it allows you to study our yellow dwarf star safely. What blew me away that first time I looked at the Sun was seeing sunspots. Just like in the books. There they were! Dark smudges on the surface of the ball of fire. It was like some kind of fruit that was starting to go bad.

            The very idea of sunspots boggled my mind. I had never heard of them before reading about them in the little Stars book. And then Bam! There they were. I was looking at them with my telescope. I was out on the deck, crunching on the ice, peering into the sky, as unblinking as a god, staring into the face of the Sun and not blinded. My little piece of precision Japanese optical equipment had taken me far above the earth.

            That was fifth grade. In the spring I would get a BB gun. Church would start to be a bigger part of my life. I was baptized now, after all. I was growing up. I had to start taking my … whatever they were called … seriously. I started looking for ways to “put away childish things.” Luckily, I wasn’t in a household where I was being rushed into adulthood. Mainly, I was fading into the background like any middle child will.

            There were the vinyl albums, 33 rpm, of Star Wars and The Black Hole. I had kept the National Geographic with the article about the life cycle of stars and the stark, almost horrifying effects of gravity on objects that are unimaginably massive. There were many times that I would be alone in my bedroom staring at the pictures in that magazine. It would be too much to say I was obsessively mesmerized by the one illustration of a black hole devouring a giant blue star. The painting was done by Victor J. Kelly. I don’t even know how many times I had looked at the depiction of stellar vampirism before I realized it wasn’t a photograph. The gruesome image a black star-eater, lifeless, lightless, put terrible suggestions into my brain. Things could be snuffed out in this universe, utterly, and forever.

            Death for stars is cold and permanent.

            I kept the magazine for years. And I wasn’t one to hold onto magazines. I didn’t even own a lot of books. When I moved out of the house abruptly at twenty, I left the National Geographic behind and my mom threw it out.

            Then in the mid-90s I was living in Detroit. I walked into one of these ratty little storefront used-book stores you used to see. I think this one was on Van Dyke near Nine Mile. I just went in out of boredom. It was the kind of place with more dust than carpet. There were tables piled higgledy-piggledy with old issues of Popular Mechanics and Playboy. I’m not exaggerating. There was a copy of the issue with Marilyn Monroe. I didn’t realize at the time that it was the first edition ever of Playboy. I have no idea why I didn’t thumb through that magazine. If I want to now, I’ll have to pay about $40 on Ebay.

            Shelved in much less chaotic fashion were some old National Geographics. I got to the early 1970s section and started pulling out copies. I knew what I was looking for – the starry cover with the purple and blue smudges of the Trifid Nebula.

            And there it was.

            I think I paid a quarter for it. We were reunited. Twenty-five years later. I still have it. I’ll never part with it now.