On physics: Gravity, vulnerability, and other strange phenomena ☄️

“Black holes are some of the most extreme phenomena in our Universe,” writes Dan Wilkins. “They are objects so dense that the force of gravity is so strong that nothing is fast enough to escape, not even light, once it has passed the point of no return.”

The point of no return is called the event horizon, which strikes me as poetic. Encircling it is the accretion disc, a flattened ring where gas and stellar dust spiral to their doom. This heats the disc up to millions of degrees, so hot that electrons separate from atoms, and generates twisting magnetic fields.

The hottest electrons glob together in the innermost region of the disc, and the unruly magnetism tangles up all the material. Ropes of scorching plasma shoot up into space, looping, twirling, whipping. When everything snaps back, the energy released produces the corona, a plume of magnetized plasma that hovers above the event horizon. All told, this violent, doomsday ballet releases incredible energy and emits various wavelengths of light, including X-rays. This is what Wilkins and his colleagues set out to study in 2019. 

In 1905, Einstein published the theory of special relativity, explaining how speed affects mass, time, and space. Newton’s laws could not explain certain phenomena, and once Einstein figured out why—E=mc^2—the laws of the universe changed.

From there, Einstein’s teacher, Hermann Minkowski, hypothesized that space and time might be connected. This went against Newtonian physics predicated on the assumptions that space and time were separate, unchanging, and absolute. Minkowski suggested the stage of our Universe was in fact a four-dimensional fabric where the three dimensions of space (width, height, depth) and the single dimension of time came together.

After another decade of tinkering, Einstein published his magnum opus in 1916: the theory of general relativity. Here, he described how gravity is not a force, as Newton thought, but the geometry by which spacetime curves in the presence of massive objects. For decades now, with technology far more advanced than anything at his disposal, Einstein has been proven right again and again and again.

Physicists tend to shy away from describing distortions in spacetime as the “warping” of reality. Scientific literacy is important, and it’s fraught to talk about physics (which is literally just math) without the language of physics. But well, uh, reality warps! The deeper the curve, the stronger the gravity, the slower the time.

Wilkins and his team studied a supermassive black hole that was 10 million times the size of our Sun. They saw the expected X-ray flares, but then they noticed something strange: shorter ones with different wavelengths that flashed with a delay. “Anything on the far side of the black hole we shouldn't be able to see, because anything that goes into the black hole can’t come out,” Wilkins explained.

A century earlier, Einstein predicted that the gravity of black holes was so strong that it could wrap light around the back of them. In other words: a black hole’s mass warped spacetime so intensely that it introduced a paradox: a way for light to escape.

Einstein called this phenomenon a “light echo.” After ruling out other possibilities, Wilkins and his team determined that those shorter flashes were reflections of X-rays glimmering off particles of dust on the far side of the accretion disc—glimmers that gravity had pulled all the way around the black hole. It was the first time light echoes had ever been documented. Einstein right again. 

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As a kid, whenever I played on swings, I always tried to go all the way around like a little Evel Knievel, or a tiny psycho X-ray. Per Newtonian physics (ugh), this requires either a specific type of swing or a giant push from another person, because a person’s momentum is negated when the chains go slack. Right when I started to float off the swing, the chains yanked me back for the downward catch. 

I must enjoy physics defiance—“You’re not the boss of me, Immutable Laws!”—because another core memory used momentum in my favor. The Rotor was a carnival ride that people called an “unsafe spinning human blender.” Its production was discontinued in the late 1970s, but by the grace of God, some version of the rotor ride came to Colorado.

At Elitch Gardens in Denver, it was known as the Mine Shaft. It looked like a big open drum with a mechanical door. As I walked inside with my dad, the teenage operator of the death machine mumbled something into a scratchy intercom. Dad leaned over and said to watch my toes. Everyone stood against the felt-lined wall. The door was closed, and we started to spin. Faster, faster, everyone screaming, dad looking green, until the moment forever emblazoned on my psyche: the floor retracted. 

“Dad, look!” I squealed into the blur, happy cheeks thwacking in the hot summer wind. I was stuck to the wall like prepubescent velcro. I tried to wave but all my bones felt too heavy, and it was a little hard to breathe, but I didn’t care. As the human blender slowed back down, I slid to the floor, static-haired and delirious.

The next year, my little brother Caleb was tall enough to go, so we ran straight to the blender from the turnstiles at the park entrance. But the Mine Shaft was gone. Legend has it somewhere out in the suburbs of Chicago, a toe got sacrificed when the floor malfunctioned, and that was it for rotor rides. I was annoyed. My dad was a podiatrist, my toes would’ve been fine. Caleb and I sulked back to our family at the kiddie side of the theme park. Back to boring gravity.

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Call it post-traumatic prayer disorder: I don’t seek answers from the Universe unless they’re peer-reviewed.

I think this is why, after Couples Therapy premiered, I took solace in the theory of general relativity. I was crushed by the speed of exposure and by the intense gravity of my vulnerability. One day I was a normal person going through life with my little bundle of dramas and yearnings, and the next I had strangers openly debating all the ways I was, am, and will always be human garbage.

Ah, to be an Omniscient Observer. To be one who merely watches, knowing all, who does not pay the personal costs of honest, total-hearted, televised psychoanalysis.

In my solace-seeking, I read about the physicist John Wheeler, who summarized the theory of general relativity in twelve words: “Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.” I remember thinking, If the literal fabric of the universe just rolls with the punches, who am I to do anything different? It was as close to a zen koan as I got, and like most koans, it was unsatisfying.

As I continued in my scientific obsession, trying to understand the mechanics of black holes (look, I was really going through it), I came across the Wilkins paper with those renegade X-rays. I was comforted to learn that gravity is not so inescapable. Whenever it felt like my freely given vulnerability had been a big mistake, I cast my reflection to the far side of the disc and surrendered to the warping of reality. It was—scientifically—the only way to survive an event horizon.

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The deeper the curve, the stronger the gravity, the slower the time. Maybe that explains why, after Brock and I had set a mass of resentment down on our relationship, the days began to feel like months, and months went on forever. 

I remember a fight last year after a hard session of Couples Therapy. It was raining outside and we hoped food would help us feel better, or at least forget that everything we just said would be televised, so we made our way to a neighborhood ramen restaurant. I cried into my beer. “Let’s call it a night,” said Brock. 

I walked home to my apartment and cried on the bed. Then in the shower. Then on the bed again. In the middle of my theatrics, I noticed a strange feeling in both arms. All my bones felt heavy and my skin was tingling, sinking, sucking in, like I was on that theme park ride.

At our next session, I told Orna about this, secretly hoping she would label it. “Oh, Kristi! That’s the telltale sign that you’re right about everything!” But she only had compassion for me, no labels. (I hate it when therapists do that.) My nervous system had simply done its job on an overloaded, emotional day and shunted blood away from my extremities. The sinking feeling inside me made sense.

Gravity is the stress response of a changing universe. Brock and I had hurt each other deeply—awful, nasty, psychic wounds, the kind that only lovers inflict. In triage, I came to rely, bizarrely, on things I learned in Mormonism: blind faith, doubting my doubts, enduring to the end. I feared it was pathological, or a Freudian reenactment of unconscious impulses. But nothing felt as true as what no theory could explain: I loved him. That was all.

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Like most people, what I mostly seek is safety and comfort. I have a limited appetite for danger. I like a little of it, though. Testing the limits of my willingness to expose flesh to risk. The risk seems worthwhile because of the intensity it brings to life, the fresh sensations, the way dipping into the sway of life remakes me, affirms my capacities to adapt and endure.

These are not things to be done alone. If one plunges into life, it’s best to do it with others you trust, even if there’s no test of that trust until the wounding happens. Who will be there for us when we fall? When we’re attacked? When we break down and can’t face our own vulnerability? That is how one finds one’s comrades.

On Vulnerability, by McKenzie Wark.

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Last week, I came across an old letter from Brock that I’d stashed away in a book, which he’d written it on a typewriter shortly after we both cheated on each other. In its three short pages, he expressed how he was very much reconciled to divorce, and even fantasized about what life might hold on the other side. But not for him—for me. Ever the salesman, he must’ve really been trying to close this deal, because to hear him tell it, my new life would involve nude beaches in Greece. (Didn’t hate it). Appeals to Mamma Mia notwithstanding, the letter felt written for his sake, not mine. I was not reconciled to divorce. He sounded like he was pushing our marriage out to sea on a funeral pyre.

I thought about storming to his apartment, knocking on his door and telling him, “I ain’t dead yet, buddy!” Instead, I burned the pages that hurt the most to read. The first page is gone, and most of the second, but not the last. “PS,” he wrote. “Roast chicken tomorrow at 5. You’re invited.”

A dinner invite at the end of his divorce fanfiction. Brock was something else.

I did not understand this man. And I was terrified of how deeply my heart bent toward him, even in its wounding. Part of me wanted a clean, Newtonian relationship. Space over here, time over there. Separate dimensions, independent, absolute. You, Me, Self, Other. I leveraged every label to talk myself out of multiple dimensions. Codependence! Compulsive heterosexuality! Insecure attachment! Woke this, woke that! “It takes some courage to let go of alertness,” says Wark. “To let oneself seep into an ambience, to let the unfamiliar in as a welcome guest.”

I’ve come to understand that the difference between a fanatic and a scientist is how they interpret the unexplainable. A fanatic will contort any and all mystery to support pre-existing ideas of science, politics, or ways of being. Fanatics are a terrified, neurotic people. The Other becomes a scapegoat to deny their own unknowingness.

But that is not the work of physics. Scientists take strange phenomena as an invitation to be curious—to predict echoes in faraway darkness, to say yes to roast chicken, and to become the unfamiliar welcome guest.