My Dear Ms. Sessum,

Will you quit blogging such nice things about me …

How much easier to give than to forkin’ receive …

Most people never get out from under the rainshadow of their parents’ gaze …

It’s hard turf, hard to chart, hard to navigate. No maps. Lots of dark matter. A black hole or two, to marry.

Fate would bring a sweet soul into my life …

That awful noise you hear is some rusted hinge inside. Damned Fate, prying it open again.

Yours Truly,
Zo

Black holes present a very interesting dilemma to physicists. On the inside is matter of some sort which must be in some configuration, but because gravity is so strong we cannot glean any information about the internal state. However, this also presents a couple of problems: If a black hole has no internal states, then dropping a box of gas into the black hole should result in a net decrease in the entropy of the universe—violating the second law of thermodynamics. If the black hole does have internal states and thus entropy, these cannot be seen from the outside since general relativity demands that the horizon be smooth. Yet we also know that black holes glow (called Hawking radiation) due to particles being produced in pairs at the event horizon. One particle with negative energy falls into the hole, the other with positive energy is radiated away from the hole. Thus the amount of matter in the hole goes down and energy is conserved. These particles are entangled (i.e., their quantum states are inextricably linked) yet as the black hole decays away to nothing the radiation is, in the end, entangled with … nothing. This, combined with the smooth event horizon is paradoxical since we know that quantum mechanics conserves information, yet here information appears to be destroyed. Whenever paradoxes arise in physics it indicates we don’t know something, and in this case that is probably quantum gravity. The reason Hawking and others have been able to predict so much about black holes is that everything happens on the event horizon, where the curvature of space is small and quantum gravity is expected to be irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »

Ayelet Waldman, Salon: Even now, although Zeke’s [age 7] pride does not allow him to linger in my arms for much longer than a minute or so, he still calls for me to lie with him at night, he still gives me ‘movie kisses’–kisses that last for a little longer than usual and involve a lot of twisting of the head and moaning.

Sooo gross.

And I say this as a mother of a grown son. This is genuine ick.

(And what’s with the brackets?)

Sorry, Ayelet, but from all grownup parents: get help.