Blackholes and Shitholes
by John Lawrence
There is an excellent two hour show on Nova about black holes. It seems they are ubiquitous in the universe. They seem to be at the center of every galaxy and elsewhere in the galaxies as well. Whereas light escapes from the stars and makes it's way to the earth where astronomers can study them, light cannot escape from a black hole simply because it is so massive that its gravity won't let it. This seems easy enough to understand. Light has mass as Einstein demonstrated so it's subject to being attracted by gravity just as Newton's apple was. A star might be called a light hole because its mass is not great enough to suck photons back to it so they escape. A black hole could be thought of as a massive star with the characteristic that light cannot escape. So what's the big deal?
There are a whole host of interesting objects in the universe for astronomers to study and get excited about. That's fine. They just recently in 2017 measured a gravity wave. It took two massive installations that must have cost millions of dollars to do it. Whether any practical applications can come out of gravity waves, which were created by two black holes colliding, remains to be seen. Anyway three scientists won a Nobel prize because of the discovery. It's interesting that somewhere else in the universe billions of years ago the two black holes which produced the gravity wave collided. And just last year the gravity wave traveling at the speed of light washed over the earth. If the scientist at one of the LIGO installations hadn't gone home at 4 AM and taken the installation out of test mode, they never would have seen it.
Scientists don't understand about the dark matter and energy that evidently exists in the universe. The dark matter could simply by the sum total of the masses of black holes. I don't see why they don't explain it that way. As for dark energy, well it goes to show that scientists just do not understand everything about the universe. There's still a lot to discover. It also seems that every little discovery requires massive, million dollar installations. Remember the super conducting super collider which cost millions? It finally was able to detect the last "God" particle, the Higgs boson!
Well, measuring gravity waves produced by the collision of two black holes is nice, couldn't all the money that went into it have been better spent eradicating disease and poverty in parts of the world that Trump calls "shitholes"? The energy and efforts of talented individuals could better be spent eliminating war and suffering around the world, not to mention homelessness in America. We don't need technological innovation so much as we need to solve problems here on earth that human societies have been grappling with for millenia.