Log24

In the fall of 1967, he was invited to give a talk…. As he spoke, he… [mentioned] something strange… what he called a gravitationally completely collapsed object. But such a phrase was a mouthful, he said, wishing aloud for a better name. "How about black hole?" someone shouted from the audience.

That was it. "I had been searching for just the right term for months, mulling it over in bed, in the bathtub, in my car, wherever I had quiet moments," he later said. "Suddenly this name seemed exactly right." He kept using the term, in lectures and on papers, and it stuck.

"Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?"

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter."

His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….

He purred a chuckle. "My place. If you want to come, I'll show you."

"Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?"

"That's what the locals call it. It's really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole."

"Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?"

"No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor."

"Here? In Rome?"

"Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here."

"How long ago?"

"No one knows," he said. "It was there six centuries before Christ, when the Etruscans took over a small town called Roma and began turning it into the capital of the world."

Related material:

Log24 on
narrative–

Life of the Party
(March 24, 2006),
and
'Nauts
(March 26, 2006)