Word: holes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black hole? The name is highly appropriate. Nothing?not even light?can escape from black holes, making them invisible. Even more astounding, these bizarre non-objects are in effect celestial vacuum cleaners that voraciously devour everything they meet. They are bottomless pits into which atomic particles, dust and giant suns all disappear without a trace. They are rips in the very fabric of space and time, places where long-cherished laws of nature simply do not apply. So unbelievable and paradoxical are these notions that they have led to what Wheeler calls "the greatest crisis ever faced by physics." Says...
...black holes science's Heffalumps? Absolutely not, insist black-hole theorists, who are among today's best and brightest scientific minds. In fact, they say, the universe probably teems with these bizarre apertures...
...scientific meeting in Manhattan, Lowell Wood, a young physicist from California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, delighted his colleagues (although he did not exactly convince them) with a plan to give the earth a virtually limitless energy supply. He suggested tapping the energy of a mini-black hole in orbit around the planet. From a spacecraft orbiting at a safe distance, pellets would be fired at the hole. This would create so much heat that the energy could be converted into microwaves and beamed down to earth. Even Wheeler, who is now at the University of Texas, and his former student...
...purpose of such technological derring-do? To create the ultimate garbage dump. Because of the strange physics at the black hole's boundary zone, waste material dropped toward it would only be partially consumed; some of the material would be flung back out at much greater speed. This material could be caught and its extra energy harnessed, like rushing water, to power the civilization. The only hitch: the engineers would have to be careful not to "feed" the black hole too much garbage, lest its event horizon expand and swallow up the whole civilization...
...anything like these visionary schemes will ever be possible. Indeed, for all the enthusiasm about black holes, some doubts about their very existence linger. But the current intellectual ferment about them transcends the importance of both their reality and practicality. Just by thinking on such a grand scale, humanity not only enlarges its universe but expands and ennobles itself. Perhaps the ideal metaphor is not Piglet's Heffalump but Browning's famous declamation: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for." To the growing fraternity of black-hole theorists, that cosmic vision...