In the heart of a Kerr-Newman black hole there is a singularity in a function called R, the Riemannian scalar curvature, a measurement of gravity. R goes to infinity. It cannot be measured.
For a long time, physicists wondered if the singularity was genuine. Maybe it was simply a result of their choice of coordinates: the way they wrote out the formula for R With the right choice of coordinates, one can extend the black hole model past the singularity into the white hole beyond. Perhaps with another choice of coordinates the singularity in the middle would go away. Perhaps it was only the ruler that broke down, not the universe that the ruler measured.
In the late 1960s, mathematicians proved that the singularity existed in all coordinates. All possible rulers broke at the same point. At the heart of the black hole’s darkness, physicists could only throw away their rulers and stand back in blank contemplation.
Days and weeks passed. I kept thinking. Nothing more, just thinking. I didn’t see the dead students in my dreams. To tell the truth, if I wanted to remember their faces I had to go back and look at their photos in the book.
Kent State didn’t haunt me. It niggled at me.
The library books came due. I wrote the names of the books in my files and took them back. I also recorded the names:
Allison Krause
Jeff Miller
Sandy Lee Scheuer
Bill Schroeder
Those names hadn’t appeared anywhere in my three story attempts. I had to write them down separately so I would remember them. Otherwise I’d lose the names and be left with three uncompleted story-scribbles that all missed the point.
Now and then I would open my “ideas” notebook and see my original jottings about Kent State. Time travel. Ghosts. But I couldn’t travel backward in time. I couldn’t summon ghosts or lay them to rest. I could stuff my stories into the empty spaces surrounding the tragedy, but the stories themselves walled off the reality, put it out of reach.
The situation reminded me of a white hole. A white hole floods its universe with light; but you can never touch it.
And so I began thinking of white holes, black holes, and a mathematics thesis whose math had leaked away, leaving behind only metaphors. The result wasn’t a story about Kent State. But at least it was my story to tell.
Imagine an object falling into a black hole: something small like the body of a young man or woman, or perhaps something large like the campus of a university.
Imagine an outside observer, a distant spectator far removed from the immediate pull of the black hole. He shines a light toward the falling object — the object casts no light of its own, so if the observer wants to see it he must provide his own illumination. He waits for the light to strike the object, then return to his eye.
There are several possibilities for what happens next.
The light may strike the object as it falls through the ergosphere, a region where places become moments and moments become places. That close to the black hole itself, the returning light particles may take years to climb back out of the gravity well and reach the observer. But someday the light will return.
Or the light may not reach the falling object until the object has crossed the event horizon. If the object is inside the hole, the light may strike the object and bounce, but it cannot reach the observer outside. The light will only bounce deeper into the blackness. The observer will never see it.
Or perhaps, if the cosmos deigns to conform itself to mathematics, there is a third alternative. The falling object plunges through the heart of the black hole and out a white hole on the other side. By the time the observer’s light enters the black hole, the object is gone. The light finds nothing but blackness. There is no contact. To the observer, the object has fallen into an impenetrable dark; but in another universe, perhaps the object tranquilly sails on.
The outside observer waits for his light to return. He wonders if the object has fallen so far he will never truly see it. There is no way to tell until the light actually comes back. If it ever does.
Other observers have given up and gone home.
The outside observer waits.
Author’s Notes
This is the one story I’ve written as me, Jim Gardner, rather than from some fictional point of view. It’s not quite a true story — I never actually sat down and wrote out the “scribbles” as they appear — but the ideas did cross my mind as I saw how the press tried to deal with the twentieth anniversary of the killings at Kent State University. Our beloved media (as they so often do) wrote around the facts without ever truly connecting to the reality of what happened.
The shootings seem like ancient history now; but for the sake of our souls, we have to remember that history is about real people with real lives and real deaths. There’s something disturbing about the air of unreality with which we often view the past — as if anything that happened more than a few days ago took place in some alien dimension that doesn’t have much to do with who we are now. I’m certainly guilty of feeling that way, too... which is one reason I wrote a story about fading memories and trivializing other people’s tragedies.