PART 1 of 4

A black hole is a celestial object you know has to be out there because you can’t see it. Where you would normally be seeing lots of stars, there’s a round black nothing, no lights at all. That’s how you know.

The dramatic name was coined by astrophysicist John Wheeler after astronomers first discovered one in the constellation Cygnus half a century ago. Cygnus X-1 is a supergiant star orbited by a massive black hole at a rate just under once a week. Best estimates place the black hole at fifteen to twenty-one times the mass of our sun, about seventy-eight miles in diameter, and spinning on its axis at the bizarre speed of about eight hundred times per second. Yet its gravitational density is so enormous that centrifugal force does not sling it apart. With continuing discoveries, astronomers today estimate there are about forty quintillion black holes in the observable universe—far fewer than the number of stars out there, but still very significant among the universe’s various structures. What role these strange objects may be playing in the interactive dynamics of the universe is not at all understood. I wish to explore that role here.

Black holes are one of the weirdest things ever risen to human attention. For starters, a black hole is not really a “hole” as the name implies, it’s a perfectly round sphere from which its immense gravity extends out in all directions. Some black holes form when a star grows old and dies—but not every black hole, and not every star, just certain ones. Different size stars reach their ends in different ways, but the relevant ones here are so big that, when their fuel has all been consumed, they collapse inward and implode with an almighty bang. The implosion instantly drives the remaining star-corpse down, down, to become a spherical core so small it is a minute fraction of its former self—but it retains the immense density the star had before it collapsed because all the star’s substance remains squeezed down into it. A star the size of our sun, for instance, might retain virtually all its huge mass while imploding down into a sphere just a mile or two in diameter.

On a larger scale, the big black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy has been estimated at about fourteen million miles diameter into which is squeezed a mass four million times greater than the sun’s. At the centers of some galaxies, supermassive black holes can contain as much material as a hundred million or more suns, and all that mass is compressed down to incomprehensible density. At the opposite end of the scale are micro black holes with diameters of perhaps 0.2 millimeters (far less than one-sixteenth of an inch). Credible science estimates that some extreme black holes could be as small as an atom and contain the mass of a large mountain.

Every black hole grows by “eating” everything that the enormous gravity of its enormous mass can suck in from the surrounding space. That means everything, including light. The fact that even light’s minute mass-less photons cannot escape a black hole’s vast density-based gravity is the reason they’re called “black”—there’s only a circle of darkness where your telescope should be seeing lots of stars. Rounding out the strangeness, the late Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes also “evaporate,” gradually losing mass and density over time until, theoretically, they might just vaporize away to nothing. Well… maybe. But maybe also means maybe not. Such theorizing might seem more objective if we had any slightest idea as to why black holes exist at all. I have a theory on that.

Though we’ve learned a fair amount about black holes over the past five decades, nobody really understands what these strange objects are, or—most particularly—why they exist and do the strange things they do. What is their role in the larger scheme of things? For one thing, the uncanny resemblance between black holes and the primal singularity that birthed the big bang should not be ignored. That odd resemblance receives less attention that I think it deserves. Consider:  the big bang was a singularity which vast energy flowed out of, did not go back into, and pointed only to what is yet to be in the future, whereas a black hole is a singularity which vast energy flows into, cannot get out of, and preserves only what was in the past. The implications of this past-future contrast take on new interest when we recall that quantum physicists and near-death experiencers both insist—insist adamantly, no question about it—that there is no such thing as time, time is an illusion. Without time, therefore, no such thing as “past” and “future” can exist… So what, really, is the difference between the big bang singularity and a black hole?

Since the singularity which became the big bang had a starring role in the universe’s creation, it has always seemed to me that the equivalent though opposite-pointed singularities known as black holes may also have some important but as-yet-unrecognized role in the poorly understood working dynamics of our universe. And, since the big bang is clearly associated with spiritually-associated questions as consistently reported by near-death experiencers, it seems logical to wonder if black holes also may have some such spiritual association.

[more in two weeks]