As most of us know, black holes are said to be concentrations of energy & matter which have such enormous power of attraction that they swallow up whole planets and even entire solar systems.
Even more startling is the fact that these entities are small in size, fantastically dense, maybe the size of a tennis ball. Maybe smaller still.
But there is one characteristic that sticks out above all others. So powerful is the force that sucks everything in its vicinity towards its centre that even light cannot escape. This is the thing that scares us most about them. It is almost as if light, above all things is sacred.
For the sighted majority of us, the illumination provided by that narrow range of wavelengths is essential if we are to know and understand our world and the lives we live there. We are lost and often terrified without it.
Surprising then that the black holes closer to home do not have us equally anxious. I’m not talking about cosmological entities, however. Rather, I refer to the hidden networks of ownership and influence which control the vast majority of wealth & power in our world yet are largely unseen and unknown.
Their actions & motivations distort what we see just like the passage of light near those deep space vortices.
Jack Hallis, the central character in Infinite Dream learns this the hard way as unseen hands take away the only woman he has truly loved. Why? Because she was steering him on a path that threatened their power and worse still, their invisibility.
Can a black hole be shrunk or dissolved by light? Not in the cosmos, perhaps but on this little planet in these tumultuous times? Maybe.
