Jonathan Lethem Quotes

You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.

If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

The edge of a black hole, the event horizon, is a boundary that marks the point of no return. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape and will be ripped to pieces, atom by atom.

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.

We have this interesting problem with black holes. What is a black hole? It is a region of space where you have mass that's confined to zero volume, which means that the density is infinitely large, which means we have no way of describing, really, what a black hole is!

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

Black holes are very exotic objects. Technically, a black hole puts a huge amount of mass inside of zero volume. So our understanding of the center of black holes doesn't make sense, which is a big clue to physicists that we don't have our physics quite right.

I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.

I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there.

A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.

Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

Proof of the black hole is a tremendous amount of mass inside a very small volume. There's 4 million times the mass of our sun within a region that's comparable to the size of our solar system.

Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull.

One of the big mysteries about the black hole at the center of the galaxy is, 'Why don't we see emission from matter falling onto the black hole, or, rather, the black hole eating up its surroundings?'

If space is a fabric, then of course fabrics can have ripples, which we have now seen directly. But fabrics can also rip. Then the question is what happens when the fabric of space and time is ripped by a black hole?

A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.

When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.

This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.

There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to?