Black hole toilet / Needling the patient / Gangue in goaf / Plank on wood

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Black hole bum— Roger Sharp adds another item to Feedback’s compendium of black holes that are findable on surface maps of our own planet (7 October). Visitors to the Maitai Esplanade Reserve in Nelson, New Zealand, may find relief […]

Black Hole Lane, Rauks (Rocks), Worm on the Tree of Life

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Mapping black holes — Richard Notley has been wondering down a dark path… and found enlightenment in remarks made by mathematician Roger Penrose (New Scientist, 19 November 2022) about the structure of the universe. He writes: “Roger […]

Non-fossil / Quantum sentence / Unrelax music / Slime mold watch

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Fossil or beehive? — … And the snideness? That isn’t unusual, either. Nor is it new. In 1934, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences printed a report called “The supposed fossil ear of maize from Cuzco, Peru”. Quantum […]

A Black Hole in a Bathtub, More or Less [research study]

One can find dense, dark understanding in a bathtub, if one is a physicist. This new study provides an example: “Black Hole Quasibound States from a Draining Bathtub Vortex Flow,” Sam Patrick, Antonin Coutant, Maurício Richartz, and Silke Weinfurtner, Physical Review Letters, vol. 121, nos. 6-10, 2018, 061101. The authors, at the University of Nottingham, […]

Black holes and their possible wigs

It was somewhere around 1973 that the high-end theoretical physicist and H-bomb co-developer (the late) professor emeritus John Archibald Wheeler announced that “A black hole has no hair.” [in: Gravitation, Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler] The concept, which was later consolidated as the ‘No-hair theorem’ has since been updated with […]