Love and Gravity: The Event Horizon

Recently I made some bad investments in friends. I don’t mean I leant them money and never saw it again. I invested something far more important than money. I invested time.

Three moved back to destinations abroad (thanks for nothing Australian immigration). And whilst we’re still in touch, it’s not the same. But two others simply vanished right in front of me. What had happened to them?

The theory of general relativity, developed by Albert Einstein in the early 20th Century predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space-time to form a black hole. It is a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape. I propose that what I have discovered is that natural forces (dare I even say the "L" word) can cause two individuals to be similarly compacted to the point that the only explanation is that they too have formed a black hole. 

We had all noticed that they seemed to be spending more time together. In the last few days we had seen them there was an obvious increase in their affection for each other, and a general dreaminess to their dispositions. As I reflect on it now, their attraction for each other escalated beyond all reasonable measure until it was like a kind of gravity. You’ve all seen it before. The couple had become inseparable: A singularity. That much was understandable, but there was more to come. 

Requests to catch up, invitations to brunches or parties sat unreplied to, lost in a background of self absorption. It was as though the messages had shifted to longer, unreadable parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Maybe their field of view had become more and more compressed until it was a smaller and smaller point in the space behind them, and they were unable to see us. Meanwhile in our field of view, outside the singularity, they had become distorted into blackness. Their attraction had grown to become so intense that nothing escaped; no words, no messages, not even light. The space around them had become dark to outsiders. It had formed an event horizon. A singularity protected by an event horizon. A black hole for two.

I think the term event horizon is the most poetic term in physics. Tantalising and poignant, the event horizon is the boundary of the region from which no escape is possible. Why? It marks the point at which the escape velocity of the black hole is equal to the speed of light. On the surface of the Earth, the escape velocity is about 11.2 km/s, approximately 33 times the speed of sound. Fire up a rocket to that magical speed and you’re off into space. On the moon, with a much smaller mass the escape velocity is a tiny 2.38km/s, not much more than the speed of a bullet out of a rifle. But the distortion of space-time around a black hole is so great that the escape velocity is the universe’s absolute speed limit, the speed of light, a ruthlessly unattainable almost 300,000 kilometres per second enforced by the laws of physics. 

At one magical luminous point on the very surface of the event horizon, called the photon sphere, light could reflect off the back of your head, orbit the singularity and arrive directly at your eyes nanoseconds later, allowing you to see the back of your own head in real time. This possibly explains the last incoherent fragments of contact that were had with the couple. Once they had crossed this, there was no going back. They had gone.

You know what I'm talking about. We've all lost friends to this "love" business. I suppose we shouldn’t be sad. For the couple, safely inside the event horizon, nothing else matters. Everything would seem normal to them, or so the theory goes. Well, we don’t really know what happens at the singularity. I certainly don’t. And at my ripe old age I’m certainly not expecting to find out. Sure I’ve had my fair share of gravitational lensing, but I ain’t holding my breath.

Perhaps they’re tightly held, compressed in a deep embrace. With all that light raining in on them from the photon sphere we could even call it enlightenment.

Bootstraps

This morning I gave myself a hug.  It was strangely comforting. Another in the long list of things that I do for myself.  Not through choice, but through necessity. I call this pulling myself up by the bootstraps. An absurdly impossible self-starting process. Putting on my face and my façade, gathering some semblance of impetus. It’s a routine. I often actually even picture the boots and lifting the straps, a pair at a time just to stand, cartoonesque yoga, solemn and foolish.  Because underneath there is now the overwhelming realisation that this is it.  It’s not bad, far from it. But it’s so much less than I had hoped for.

In one of those weird synchronicities, bootstrapping in computing is also a self starting process that supposedly proceeds without external input. But is has a very different etymology. The earliest computers were colossal empty engines of valves and wires until their operating systems were loaded. The British computers used paper cards punched with ones and zeroes to load the core software but the American ones used paper ribbons like ticker tape. Their operators called them bootstraps, because they were like the laces of giant shoes. So one ‘bootstrapped’ an American computer to get it started. And when it crashed, it’s where the term ‘rebooting’ comes from.

It’s January, rebooting the year, and of course there’s a list of New Year resolutions. I’m ticking them off, one by one.  Back at the gym – check (personal trainer thank you very much). Repair the outdoor furniture – check. Blogging again – check. But amidst these superficial restarts are a much darker, confrontingly honest set of resolutions that are finally being acted on. At long last, and arguably 20 years to late (though better than never), I am setting up for my independent financial security. Investing, consolidating superannuation, acquiring relevant insurances. It’s been a long time coming. But it’s a very real material step in a realisation that there is no prince arriving on his white charger to save me. I am that prince.

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." So begins Charles Dickens' novel David Copperfield. It’s too early to determine if my role is hero, or something less, and I’m prepared to be optimistic about that. But it’s very clear that almost half a century on, and after ten years of, shall we say, unhelpful casting, the role remains steadfastly unfilled.

I sense that the ones and zeroes are moving on the tape that contains my operating system. So it’s just me. In fact it probably always has been just me. And I guess that, even though it seems a bit less bright from time to time, that’s alright. Thank you Morpheus – apparently I have chosen the red pill. Bear with me while the operating system adjusts – I’m a whole lot more complicated than mere bootlaces.