A Black Hole and our Capacity for Wonder

This is the image of the day. No, the image of the year, surely. Maybe of the decade. I find it magnificent. Wondrous. Humbling. And yes, I admit it. Moving.

This is of course the first ever image of a black hole. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of our sun. It is about 54 million light years away, at the heart of the galaxy known as Messier (M) 87.

I’ve no hesitation in saying that this image, redolent of a doughnut, will prove to be as emblematic as that famous photo of the earth rising above the surface of the moon. (That and other famous astronomical images are here, thanks to the Guardian.) There are some photos you know you’ll never forget, because they burn themselves into the memory and the imagination. This is one of them.

As a milestone in scientific collaboration, this image is already a spectacular achievement. It is the result of networking eight radio telescopes across the world into what’s been called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The effect is to create a receptor dish as large as the earth itself with a vastly increased reach into space. It’s an amazing feat of technology in its own right, not to mention the extent of partnership and team working among all the research agencies involved. When human beings pool their knowledge and their talents, there seem to be no limits to what can be done.

As for this ring of fire, I think it would need a poet to do it justice. As we know, black holes can’t themselves be seen directly since all electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, is pulled back inside these super-massive objects by their immense gravitational fields. What we are looking at is the event-horizon, the fiery perimeter-zone where matter in the “accretion disc” is being sucked inside the black hole at nearly the speed of light and generating such prodigious quantities of energy that it becomes visible in its last gasp.

So as the name implies, black holes will always be deeply mysterious. Astrophysicists refer to them as singularities where the “normal” laws of physics break down. Beyond the event horizon is unknowable, so distorted is the space-time continuum by the massive gravitational effects of black holes. But what we do know is that these objects power the galaxies they lie at the heart of. That includes our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We can look forward to seeing “our own” black hole, Sagittarius A*, in due course, thanks to the EHT.

We owe a great deal of the theory of black holes to Stephen Hawking, especially what happens around the event horizon. It’s a tribute to his extraordinary mind that observation is on the point of confirming his theoretical models. It may possibly refine them too: falsifiability is a key concept in establishing sound scientific hypotheses. But behind him stands another of the twentieth century’s greatest scientists, Albert Einstein. His theory of general relativity will also be tested by these latest revelations. Relativity theory was itself a refinement of Newtonian physics whose accuracy failed near extremities and singularities like very massive objects. Will his theories too need further modification in the light of the research that will follow this image of a black hole?

What we need to remember is the key role that is played in science by the imagination. The periodic table, the Benzene ring and the structure of the double helix in DNA are all attributable as much to the imaginative capacity to think in new ways that break out of the boundaries of accepted models as to observation by itself. The black hole was imagined long before it was theorised about let alone observed in its own right, as has been this year.

Which is where the arts can perhaps add their commentary on this dazzling image. I saw two allusions in it that have stayed with me this afternoon. The first is a poem by the seventeenth century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan:

I saw eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Drive’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.

“Calm” a black hole is not. It is a vortex of furious uncontained violence. And yet from half way across the cosmos, it radiates a sense of timeless stability. The perception gets me thinking about time, eternity and God, what is transient, what is enduring, where we came from and where we are bound on this little speck of stardust we call Earth. Spirituality comes into things when we look up at the heavens and read how they “declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19.1).

The other allusion is to Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas The Ring. Here the connotations are altogether darker, more true perhaps to the catastrophic forces of a black hole. The ring is a symbol of naked power, stolen from its rightful owners the Rhine Maidens and thereafter destroying everyone, god or mortal, whom it touches. (Cross reference J. R. R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings where many of these themes recur.) In the final scene of the fourth drama, The Twilight of the Gods, the ring is returned to the Rhine, the old corrupted world is destroyed and out of fire and water a new, redeemed order rises up. Black holes, conjectures Hawking, play a vital part in “recycling” the matter of the universe which, if you think about it, is a redemptive image. Wagnerian in its scope, you might say.

I began by saying that I was humbled by this image of a black hole. It put me in my place, and put my worries and concerns into a larger context. It’s not that they don’t matter any more, simply that when we look beyond ourselves and contemplate the wonders of the cosmos, it has a curiously calming, healing effect. To me, that makes this iconic image religious in character. And that should drive us to our knees.