We live in a “Universe of Black Holes,” as titled in a recent physics presentation livestreamed from the University of Oxford. Our Milky Way galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, about one percent of which become black holes, objects so dense that even light can’t escape their gravity. The Milky Way is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, as physicist Janna Levin dramatized with a video that pulled out from Earth to the furthest cosmic scale and back, giving a brief talk on black hole basics before interviewing Roger Penrose, who won the physics Nobel in 2020 “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”
Besides the numerous black holes formed from stars, there are also supermassive black holes located in the centers of galaxies; every sizable galaxy seems to have one. Ordinary black holes aren’t as large as people may think. They may be the size of a city, but with the mass of a star compressed into that area. There also may be microscopic black holes. Moreover, black holes seem to play some fundamental role in the universe. “They share characteristics that sound like those of fundamental particles,” Levin said, noting that Penrose’s work has pointed in that direction.
Black holes have had a cultural impact beyond science fiction. Among the autumn review copies I requested was Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes, by Lynn Gamwell (with foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson). When MIT Press didn’t send it, I bought the book, and was intrigued by its broad selection of evocative works at this nexus of art and science. Yiannis Kranidiotis’ 2019 Black Hole, for instance, represents spacetime curvature with plastic sheets, and a singularity with light projected from a black cone, as a speaker emits sounds derived from gravitational waves, a prime source of which are collisions of black holes.
One image in the book, an early depiction of a black hole, is a painting by Helmut Wimmer, staff artist at New York’s Hayden Planetarium, used as the cover of Physics Today magazine in January 1971. Wimmer conceived it, with a prism of light sucked into a warping of space, after losing a night’s sleep over how to depict the exotic astronomical object. But the Munich-born Wimmer was talented, as his Russian overseers noticed when they assigned him as a young POW to restore ornamental plaster in government buildings in Gorky. An essay in the Physics Today issue, “Introducing the Black Hole,” by physicists Remo Ruffini and John A. Wheeler, had an illustration of furniture and such going into a black hole, which inspired another item in the book, Björn Dahlem’s sculpture Black Hole (Cygnus X-1).
Black holes as a metaphor for nothingness are a theme of some artworks in Conjuring the Void. To see Anish Kapoor’s 1992 Descent into Limbo, “viewers entered a building in which there appeared to be a flat black circle painted on the floor,” Gamwell writes. In fact, it was a cylindrical hole eight feet deep. Kapoor has stated: “I am interested in the void, the moment when it’s not a hole. It’s a space full of what isn’t there.” A man fell into it once. Kapoor, whose work is titled after a 1492 painting by Andrea Mantegna, seemingly “didn’t make a conscious decision to create artwork about black holes,” Gamwell writes, “but he intuits (whether consciously or not) qualities of black holes from his cultural matrix.” By contrast, UK-based Nepalese painter Govinda Sah, while sharing a preoccupation with nothingness, draws on the physics of black holes in his 2009 Trap Within, an interpretation of the trapping of light by such an object, depicted with oil, acrylic and collage on canvas.
I’ve written about the political entanglement of gravitational-wave astronomy, with budget cuts threatening to shut down half of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), crippling a cutting-edge scientific field. A perusal of the 1971 Physics Today was a reminder that political clashes over physics aren’t new, though the ideological spectrum’s relation to physics and other sciences may reverse polarity from time to time.
In a letter titled “Beware the new left,” physicist Gary Stupian argued “that much of the disaffection of radicals stems from their feelings of personal inadequacy in coping with a world shaped by science and technology.” It wasn’t about the role of physics in producing weapons or damaging the environment, in this view, but rather that college students not studying science (or vocational fields) “don’t have any feeling for the underlying technology but, since they are intellectuals and should be running the world (they are told this weekly by Congressmen, university presidents and professors), they are very upset by their lack of comprehension. They can choose either to learn about science or to lash out against science. Almost all select the second, easier alternative.”
That long-ago struggle—physicists with pocket protectors, versus long-haired, Mao-inclined radicals—has an ironic echo today, as the New Right’s at odds with scientists and universities. Stupian’s dismissal would’ve appealed to me in the 1980s, when as a college student I read Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, which expressed a similar disdain, its essay “Apollo and Dionysus” contrasting the Apollo 11 mission with Woodstock hippies rolling in the mud. Nowadays I’m inclined to err away from dismissing ideological opponents as stupid, except when the evidence becomes massive.