Black holes are prisons of light. They are both metaphor and physical entity, mute commentary on what is known, unknown, and unknowable. Well-studied but poorly understood, like a virus.
What happens gravitationally if you squeeze the mass of an object to a point? This was Karl Schwarzschild’s question while stationed at the Russian front of the First World War. You get a point of no volume and infinite density a singularity. It would be surrounded by a region where nothing, not even light, could escape. This boundary became known as the event horizon because no event within the boundary could be observed from outside.
By Gamini Weerakoon
DoublespeakView(s):
Wishing you ‘A Very Wishful New Year’ was our greeting to all Sri Lankans for 2020. There was a very good reason for it because 2019 was an extremely ‘Promising Year’, with Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sajith Premadasa trying to outbid each other with promises to people that would have truly made their life in Lanka a Heaven on Earth.
The knowledgeable masses truly believed in the promises made and supporters of both candidates went into ecstasies and finally to the polls in their thousands. We as observers of the passing scene could only wish the promises made and wishes hoped for would come true.