Black Holes and How We Perceive Them

Welcome

About two days ago on March 26th, I met with some friends in Discord, and we decided to watch Interstellar together. As any normal movie watching session goes during this time, we were all sitting in different places in the country on a computer, phone, and/or tablet and had one person streaming the movie so we could all watch together, but separate! I have two monitors, two keyboards, and a big desk. I had Interstellar on one screen and our chat on the other and I sat there for all of 3 hours mesmerized. I know little to nothing about black holes at this point so watching the movie that is shot in a way to make it seem so epic had me awestruck. Space is a scary notion, so to be something to fear IN a scary place… now that is some notoriety. We wrapped the movie up around 9pm and I spent most of that night and the weekend pondering Black Holes and their possibilities. There were many questions that came to mind, the one I need to answer is, what are black holes, anyways? I do understand that due to its nature and of course, space, it’s a relative question. I want to see where we are as a species on the understanding of this relativity and think it will be enjoyable to research.

Black Holes Briefly

I watched a short video on Youtube by kurzgesagt titled, “Black Holes Explained -From Birth to Death” (December 15, 2015), in which we are taken through the basics of a Black Hole from its creation, all the way to its death. We are shown using very well done and colorful animations how the death of a star can become one of two things, either a neutron star, or a black hole.

We are told about the “Event Horizon” which is everything inside the black hole. You need to be travelling at the speed of light to escape the event horizon so if you are in there, you are not getting out. Due to the speed of which everything is moving inside the black hole we only see the blackness. The hole part of a black hole is called the singularity and it is a bit more complex. So complex that scientists do not know why it is a hole really. Sort of like dividing by 0, we kind of just accept that the idea of it is there but the technicalities are a bit fuzzy.

In terms of you falling into a black hole or the event horizon there are only two options that could happen as far as we know, one being that you die a quick death. The event horizon takes you in one singular direction, but with a mass and speed that a human body cannot withstand. So eventually, you would slowly stretch out into a single organism of plastic goop. The other option being that you die and even quicker death. In this instance the moment the human body enters the event horizon it is shredded down to nothing immediately. Depending on the size of the black hole you could survive a bit longer in a super massive black hole while you float around getting closer to the event horizon.

This post was the best starting point for me on this project as it let me fully understand a black hole in five minutes. They do an excellent job explaining what we know about black holes and what is still unknown. I watched part 2 as well for my own enjoyment.

Interstellar and Black Holes

The cultural artifact I chose, that also inspired my topic idea, is the hit 2014 movie, Interstellar. Directed by Christopher Nolan and starring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway we are taken to a dystopian earth on the brink of total meltdown in the 2070’s. We are led through this world by ex-NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) his task to lead a venture through a wormhole (black hole) in hopes of finding a new planet for the remaining humans on earth to migrate to. We are informed by the lead at Nasa, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), that another group was already sent out in exploration, but their communications have gone silent, and they need Cooper to continue the mission with a new team. Cooper is informed of his two plans of action, plan A, in which Cooper is tasked to essentially send the necessary data back to create the coordinates for people to leave earth. Then there is plan B, where Cooper and his crew instead find the first team out in wormhole somewhere and plan a new colony away from earth.

So, the quote that I chose from Interstellar is from Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), she says, “Murphy’s Law. Whatever can happen, will happen. Accidents are the first building block of evolution, but when you’re orbiting a black hole, not enough can happen, it sucks in asteroids and comets, other events which would otherwise reach you”. I really enjoyed this quote because it shows that even though there are laws, we have been established in science that make total and complete sense, it all goes out the window when you involve black holes. This really sparked my interest in learning more about the extensive and confusing nature of black holes. Overall,

Matthew McConaughey’s performance and the deep thought nature of Interstellar makes it one of my favorite more recent films.

I am revisiting this artifact because after doing more research I wanted to revisit Interstellar based on it being a movie that deals with scientific theory, so how much of it was accurate to some degree. I was able to find an interview with the science advisor Nolan had on set with him to help film and create Interstellar. Kip Thorne who is a Caltech Physicist dove into his role in Interstellar.

He is asked questions regarding his book where he was gone in depth into the science in Interstellar and is asked about the “non-negotiable” and rather far-fetched idea Nolan brought to him for the astronauts to visit a planet orbiting Gargantua where relativistic effects make an hour there equate to seven years back on Earth. He goes into detail how the problem seemed to be that no planet could endure the resulting gravitational forces. This was something that even I thought was impossible, intuitively, until I went and slept on it and did a few hours of calculations. I concluded that in fact it is possible. The black hole needs to be spinning very fast but is possible for the spin to be fast enough for a planet in the necessarily close, stable, circular orbit to not be ripped apart”. He mentioned how it took significant number crunching and research for these theories to not only work but for it to be depicted to a point where it is within reasonable grasp of the audience.

Reading through the whole interview gave me such a greater outlook into the enjoyment of watching Interstellar. To know that there were multiple brainstorming sessions with really physicists to come up with the plot and details and overall visual brilliance that is in that movie is too good. I want to re-watch it right now with all of this knowledge I have, and I will soon.

Pop Culture and Black Holes

So now that I have done my scientific findings and fully understood the reach that black holes have not only in space but on the minds of the common person, I wanted to look towards pop culture! How black holes are in the wild is almost exclusively how they are portrayed in movies as well. Yes, some films take the extra leap to call them “wormholes” to make it work for their plot but overall, they depict black holes as this enigma that really no knows the full depth of. Using a bit of an outdated website that was funded by NASA, I was able to see some of the older references to black holes in the western world.

Starting with the very first instance that is listed where the notion of a black hole like presence is mentioned would be the Star Trek tv series (1967). In “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, the crew flies too close to a “black star” causing the ship to be pulled into the gravitational pull and ultimately causing the crew to warp to the late 60s. So, while at this time the term “black hole” was not properly coined we can see an early instance of the use of unknown space elements being used to create interesting ideas in storytelling. So even though the science does not quite work here, there is some idea of time warping at play.

The next early instance of pop culture reference is a movie that came out in 1979 called “The Black Hole” by Disney. In this attempt by Disney to capitalize on the newly coined term and public attention we are given a plot in which a ship and a single crewmate are hovering new a black hole and a bypassing ship attempts a rescue. It is very interesting to see how not even 15 years after the term is organically brought about, Disney was there trying to get their foot in the door with it all.

For a more recent example with black hole popularity, we look towards the popular tv show Doctor Who and the episode “Impossible Planet” (2006). It is here we see the Doctor’s time machine appear on a planet near the inner edge of an accretion disk around a black hole. While the science of all of this is wrong, mainly due to the idea that anything near a black hole would not last long, even a planet would be destroyed within seconds near the hole. It still goes a long way to show the fascination that comes with space and how it will always be intertwined with the idea of black holes.

In Closing

My research question is, what are black holes, anyways? I believe to this point I have done my technical research regarding the theory that is black holes to the now physical photo evidence we have and the progression to get there. I also believe the cultural aspect of it all has been grasped as well. Black holes are and will always be to pop culture a symbol of uncertainty, darkness, and destruction. Black holes are void of light and therefore void of hope as we throw that into the same vein in our society. As we progress as a species we will inevitably continue to learn more and more about deep space and in the meantime we have creative minds of our time to visualize the what ifs for now.

Works Cited

1. Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell. “Black Holes Explained — From Birth to Death.” YouTube, uploaded by Kurzgesagt, 15 Dec. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-P5IFTqB98.
2. — -. “The Ultimate Guide to Black Holes.” YouTube, uploaded by Kurzgesagt, 27 Apr. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqsLTNkzvaY.
3. Wikipedia contributors. “Interstellar (Film).” Wikipedia, 14 May 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film).
4. Billings, Lee. “Parsing the Science of Interstellar with Physicist Kip Thorne.” Scientific American Blog Network, 28 Nov. 2014, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/parsing-the-science-of-interstellar-with-physicist-kip-thorne.
5. “Pop Culture References to Black Holes in Music, Movies, and Literature — StarDate’s Black Hole Encyclopedia.” StarDate, 2005, blackholes.stardate.org/popculture.html.