COOL SCIENCE FACTS: white holes and the jansky hiss

I just finished this book, White Holes by Carlo Rovelli.

Scott got it for me at Warwicks in La Jolla. I picked it out because it was cute and tiny, and then when I opened it, it looked like an alt lit book about science.

On this page, we have both the Tao Lin and the Scott McClanahan schools of alt lit (sorry for referring to you as alt lit, Scott).

I learned a lot of cool things by reading it!!!! GOD I LOVE SCIENCE FACTS

I liked the epigraph by Albert Einstein: The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger… is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

The book is, as the title says, about white holes. It turns out that they don’t even know if white holes are real; they just make sense, based on logic and math. I love that people’s jobs are based on coming up with random shit that may or may not exist. I should have been a scientist!

“Clocks run faster in the mountains than in the plains” because they “always slow down in the vicinity of any mass” (10-12).

Black holes are tunnels!

Karl Jansky first heard black holes in 1928. In 1933, this sound was played on the radio. I was unable to find the recording, which, if you ask me, is a true failure of the internet. However, I did find this, which I guess is the same sound:

I generally don’t like white noise but that one is good.

Stars rotate around the earth every 23 hours and 56 minutes, which is something Jansky discovered.

This is what the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the one Jansky heard, looks like:

A full-size replica of Janksy’s antenna, which was called his “merry-go-round” by his colleagues, is at the Green Bank Observatory in Green Bank, WV.

(I was supposed to go there in Aug. 2022 but we thought Scott’s mom was dying so we had to flee our vacation and Nicolette, Jordan, and Megan, went without me. They sent me postcards instead. Nicolette’s says: “The Green Bank telescope can focus on a piece of pepperoni on your 12” pizza from 3 miles away with 100% accuracy.”)

I like this quote: “we have access only to perspectives. reality is perhaps nothing other than perspectives. there is no absolute. we are limited, impermanent. and precisely for this reason, to live, to be, as we do, is so light and sweet…” (30).

Gravity, a definition: “A distortion of time and space, influenced by things” (36)

I like that this chart, which shows the timeline of a black hole, includes an angel:

Last night, after I finished the book, Scott and I started wondering about things, like if rigor mortise happens in space (it does, briefly, if your corpse is in a space suit with oxygen; otherwise, you either freeze or become a mummy) and we learned that space has a smell: it is described as burnt meat, burnt cake, or metal.

I bet that’s an expensive perfume!

I want to smell space!