— unpredictable thoughts

The New York Times / John A. Wheeler at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity in 1967.

We all talk about black holes today. My home­work was swal­lowed up by a black hole…

One par­tic­u­lar aspect of Einstein’s the­ory got Dr. Wheeler’s atten­tion. In 1939, J. Robert Oppen­heimer, who would later be a leader in the Man­hat­tan Project, and a stu­dent, Hart­land Sny­der, sug­gested that Einstein’s equa­tions had made an apoc­a­lyp­tic pre­dic­tion. A dead star of suf­fi­cient mass could col­lapse into a heap so dense that light could not even escape from it. The star would col­lapse for­ever while space­time wrapped around it like a dark cloak. At the cen­ter, space would be infi­nitely curved and mat­ter infi­nitely dense, an appar­ent absur­dity known as a sin­gu­lar­ity. — from The New York Times

The black hole “teaches us that space can be crum­pled like a piece of paper into an infin­i­tes­i­mal dot, that time can be extin­guished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are any­thing but,” he wrote in his 1999 auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “Geons, Black Holes & Quan­tum Foam: A Life in Physics.” (Its co-author is Ken­neth Ford, a for­mer stu­dent and a retired direc­tor of the Amer­i­can Insti­tute of Physics.)

John A. Wheeler, Physi­cist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96 — New York Times

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Tags: black­hole, space, time, his­tory, “John A. Wheeler

http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/05/01/colbert/

Again Salon.com comes through for me. This is a won­der­ful piece that is spot on. The only brave jour­nal­ist so far to see the per­for­mance and speak to it truthfully.

excerpt:

In the late 1960s, the Sit­u­a­tion­ists in France called such ironic mock­ery “détourne­ment,” a word that roughly trans­lates to “abduc­tion” or “embez­zle­ment.” It was con­sid­ered a rev­o­lu­tion­ary act, help­ing to chan­nel the frus­tra­tion of the Paris stu­dent riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paint­ings, news­pa­pers, books and doc­u­men­tary films, seek­ing sub­ver­sive ideas in the found objects of pop­u­lar cul­ture. “Pla­gia­rism is nec­es­sary,” wrote Guy Debord, the famed Sit­u­a­tion­ist, refer­ring to his strat­egy of mock­ery and semi­otic inver­sion. “Progress demands it. Stay­ing close to an author’s phras­ing, pla­gia­rism exploits his expres­sions, erases false ideas, replaces them with cor­rect ideas.”

By Michael Scherer