Massive Black Hole Quotes

We fear what we don't know, or whatever seems like a mystery to us. ~ Andrea Barbosa

As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole. ~ Andrea M. Ghez

Banishing zero also solves the infinity problems in general relativity. If you imagine a black hole as a string, no longer do objects fall through a rip in the fabric of space-time. Instead, a particle loop approaching a black-hole loop stretches out and touches the black hole. The two loops tremble, tear, and form one loop: a slightly more massive black hole. (Some theorists believe that the act of merging a particle to a black hole creates bizarre particles such as tachyons: particles with imaginary mass that travel backward in time and move faster than light. Such particles might be admissable in certain versions of string theory.) ~ Charles Seife

Charlie had always told Lenore things that she would never admit to anyone else. Lenore had known Rusty for over fifty years. She was a black hole into which all of the Quinn family secrets disappeared. ~ Karin Slaughter

Imagine if you were the positive pole of a magnet, and you were told that under no circumstances were you allowed to touch that negative pole that was sucking you in like a black hole. Or if you crawled out of the desert and found a woman standing with a pitcher of ice water, but she held it out of your reach. Imagine jumping off a building, and then being told not to fall.
That's what it feels like to want a drink. ~ Jodi Picoult

Putting labels on others creates a black hole of disregard where judgment thrives and schisms deepen. ~ David W. Earle

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by space
And I learnt that time slows near a black hole.
Inside a black hole, time stops altogether.
Whether or not this theory will ever be proved,
I'm moved to believe this would be the perfect place to love someone. ~ Shane Koyczan

Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light.

You can't see a black hole, but if you look closesly, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it - the way it changes the orbit of solar systems or draws off a star's light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center,

Maybe we couldn't have stopped Jesse's collapse, but we should have seen it happening. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

The edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is a boundary that marks the point of no return. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape and will be ripped to pieces, atom by atom. ~ Kevin McCarthy

He had given her a copy of a recently published paper that held that the power of entropy weakens near the event horizon of a vanishing black hole. The weakening of entropy, by extension, could give rise to the formation of structure, and this could suffice to furnish the unique conditions necessary for the emergence of life. ~ Koji Suzuki

God is a philosophical black hole – the point where reason breaks down. ~ Kedar Joshi

Death doesn't make you sad- it makes you empty. That's what's so bad about it. All of your charms and beliefs and funny habits fall fast through a big black hole, and suddenly you know they're gone because just as suddenly, there's nothing left at all inside. ~ Jonathan Carroll

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. ~ F.K. Preston

Sometimes I just want to tell a story regardless of whether it fits what the show is saying. I've been in a lot of writing rooms where somebody says an idea and everyone's dying, like laughing so they're delirious. It's like a black hole in a good way, everything starts to fall into it, you know what I mean. ~ Louis C.K.

Black holes were invented by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder in 1939. Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions of Einstein's equations that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. This solution of Einstein's equations was profoundly novel. It has had enormous impact on the later development of astrophysics. ~ Freeman Dyson

When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

And then you two go and call attention to yourselves like this," Ian continued. "Holding hands in a pedalo, for Christ's sake. They must have been frothing at the mouth at the thought of you two reproducing, wondering if you'd give birth to some kind of metaphysically enhanced creature or a bottomless black hole. ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

Hadn't been able to avoid hearing about the Tea Party, a recrudescence of the far right sooner than I would've hoped. Depending on whom you ask, the Tea Party formed either as a spontaneous grassroots protest against the government's massive interventions in the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, an hysterical backlash against our first black president, or just a hasty rebranding of the Republican Party now that the name Republican had taken on the same stigma as the Pinto, DC-10, and other products that reliably self-destruct. Their platform was the usual Republican wish list - cut taxes, gut the government, repeal the last century and revoke the social contract - and happened to coincide with the financial interests of their billionaire backers. They were widely regarded, on the left,* as dingbats. But today I was going to resist the impulse to sneer and feel superior and instead try, for once, to listen. ~ Tim Kreider

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn't tell us what we want or need to know. ~ Richard Saul Wurman

Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called "strange quarks," which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn't happened. Finding ~ Bill Bryson

Michael Freeman was thirty-five years old – a former Special Forces soldier turned policeman. He was a tall and slim black man, with grey-flecked hair and dark almond-shaped eyes. His smile was tight-lipped – half knowing and half strategic. It hid a mouthful of craggy teeth. A childhood in Detroit's East Side with an aggressive, alcoholic father had taught him to play things close to his chest, to look and listen. His colleagues knew him as a patient thinker, sedulous, missing nothing given time. Intellectually savvy and emotionally guarded, he exuded certitude. In Afghanistan, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he spent several weeks as a mounted outlier with the Northern Alliance in the Alma Tak Mountains, beyond the range of reinforcement or rescue – drinking filtered ditchwater and eating nuts scavenged from corpses – and calling down massive airstrikes on Taliban positions. He gained a certain reputation. Word spread the length of the Darya Suf River valley, through the Tiangi Gap to the stronghold at Mazar-i-Sharif that there was a monster loose in the mountains and the Taliban called him 'bor-buka', which seemed to mean black or devil or whirlwind, and, at times, all of these things. ~ Simon Conway

I changed my mind. Maybe I do want a black hole for a vagina. How bad could it be? I wouldn't need to carry a purse anymore. I could just shove things up my twat. 'Oh, you need a pen? Hold on, let me check in my vagina. What's that you say? Do I have a flashlight? Let me stick my hand up my vag and find out.' Let's go home. We could do a home birth in the bathtub. It might be a tight squeeze but I bet we could both fit in there. ~ Tara Sivec

Black holes are the seductive dragons of the universe, outwardly quiescent yet violent at the heart, uncanny, hostile, primeval, emitting a negative radiance that draws all toward them, gobbling up all who come too close. Once having entered the tumultuous orbit of a black hole, nothing can break away from its passionate but fatal embrace. Though cons of teasing play may be granted the doomed, ultimately play turns to prey and all are sucked haplessly―brilliantly aglow, true, but oh so briefly so―into the fire-breathing maw of oblivion. Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order. And darkness illumination: for, as dragons are also called worms, so black hole are known as wormholes, offering a mystical and intimate pathway to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, thus bring light as they consume it. ~ Robert Coover

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. ~ Andrea M. Ghez

... there is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing. ~ Jesse Browner

[Voicing a cartoon] feels like going down a mysterious but joyful black hole. Once you relax for 15 or 20 minutes, and really go, "I don't care if I look like an ass," it's really fun to see what happens. You know that nothing is being visually judged. ~ Jim Parsons

I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. ~ Jacques Lusseyran

every time i made someone the centre of my universe

i also made a black hole for myself

w/out realising ~ Malab, The Komorébi

Thick smoke like a herd of black horses was rising over the massive building and being blown around by the wind. ~ Ismail Kadare

Let us discuss these problems in some detail. One problem is to amass enough energy to rip the fabric of space and time. The simplest way to do this is to compress an object until it becomes smaller than its "event horizon." For the sun, this means compressing it down to about 2 miles in diameter, whereupon it will collapse into a black hole. (The Sun's gravity is too weak to compress it naturally down to 2 miles, so our sun will never become a black hole, In principle, this means that anything, even you, can become a black hole if you were sufficiently compressed. This would mean compressing all the atoms of your body to smaller than subatomic distances-a feat that is beyond the capabilities of modern science.)

A more practical approach would be to assemble a batter of laser beams to fire an intense beam at a specific spot. Or to build a huge atom smasher to create two beams, which would then collide with each other at fantastic energies, sufficient to create a small tear in the fabric of space-time. ~ Michio Kaku

Time cannot put anything in your hands until you let go off the time. ~ Vishwanath S J

I saw the prince when I was in Os Alta," said Ekaterina. "He's not bad looking."
"Not bad looking?" said another voice. "He's damnably handsome."
Luchenko scowled. "Since when - "
"Brave in battle, smart as a whip." Now the voice seemed to be coming from above us. Luchenko craned his neck, peering into the trees. "An excellent dancer," said the voice. "Oh, and an even better shot."
"Who - " Luchenko never got to finish. A blast rang out, and a tiny black hole appeared between his eyes.
I gasped. "Imposs - "
"Don't say it," muttered Mal. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Fish like shiny things, stupid people like shiny things, and the late Nebular Romular Ichibar IV liked shiny things. He burned to death when he flew too close to a bright star, which ironically got swallowed up by the least shiny object in the universe - a black hole. ~ Jarod Kintz