Black holes pose riddles for us. I am not a cosmologist and engage with black holes through popular science, with a philosophical interest. They mark a limit of our imagination. Gravitational force influences space and time, science says. Concentrated at one point, it compresses matter into its pure substance, squeezes atomic nuclei and electrons together into a mass (atoms consist largely of emptiness, after all). With its incredible gravitational force, this mass draws everything in and bends and distorts space and time.
A threshold surrounds the black hole, an event horizon. Once this is crossed, there is no return, that is, light is no longer reflected but absorbed. So we do not see what happens inside. Something similar seems to apply to time and space. Although black holes can move through our spacetime, they themselves are, so to speak, outside it – which really does exceed our imagination. There seem to be very many of them in our universe. Most galaxies seem to have a super-large black hole at their center.
Limits of the imagination
The physics of black holes raises countless riddles and paradoxes. Above all, however, they show a limit. Our thinking is shaped linearly, that is, our sense of time is in the now, which extends over a moment. It stands within a temporal sequence, a past that preceded it and a future that is anticipated and will occur. Something similar applies to space: Our conception says that, within (3-dimensional) space, we can in principle move infinitely far in all directions.
These assumptions are false. They are annulled by black holes. For Kant, space and time were therefore categories a priori. That is, they determine our perception and are not themselves objects of our perception; we can say nothing about their actual nature. We move in space and time, but do not perceive them themselves. Space and time shape our thinking; we cannot overcome them within our thinking. This makes it difficult to think about black holes.
But black holes are there, and for our thinking they fall into the ontological drawer with things we do not understand. Other things in this drawer are death, consciousness, spirituality. Black holes resemble these things because they mark limits of our imagination. Yet they also differ fundamentally. We know black holes only through science; outside science we have no access to them. We know death, consciousness and spirituality only from our experience; science has little access to their essential qualities. The statements of science about death, consciousness and spirituality are unsatisfying and reductionist.
Perhaps all 4, that is, black holes, death, consciousness and spirituality, mark event horizons in different ways.
Speculation about other dimensions
I would like to speculate a little. If black holes are not part of our spacetime but at the same time occur within it, perhaps they are part of another dimension. Perhaps in another dimension there is an arrangement of black holes that have the character of events there. Perhaps our spacetime is only a property of another dimension.
In quantum mechanics, every atom ‘knows’ about the other atoms in the universe. So-called interaction describes the phenomenon. If I change something at one place in the universe, the constellation of the universe as a whole is changed. That is, at the other end of the universe, the information that something has changed is present; otherwise the laws of physics would be suspended. This complex density of information is likewise annulled by black holes. What happens inside a black hole has no interaction with our spacetime. Only the gravitational force of the black hole itself has an effect. Here too we quickly reach the limits of our imagination again. Black holes also seem to be information holes.
But if our world is primarily spiritual rather than physical, how do black holes in the universe fit into this? Do black holes then form spiritual holes too?
Leave a Reply