Peering into the Abyss: Collaboration is needed to merely catch a glimpse of a black hole
- Josh Jones
- Jun 23, 2022
- 8 min read
When I feel my worst, I’m either sinking to the bottom of the ocean with an anchor around my neck or floating out into the darkness of deep space towards a huge meteor or black hole.
Most of my daydreams are wakeful nightmares, inescapable, and the more you do the worse things get, like an abyss of quicksand. I don’t know if there is a plural for abyss, but I guess it would follow octopus and octopi – I am in one of two abyi’s going uhhh-bye-bye. [for the record abysses is the correct term – but doesn’t have the same ring to say going bye-bye in the abysses]
The definition of abyss is a hole so deep or a space so great it cannot be measured, originating from the Greek word meaning bottomless. This thought along with many articles over the last weeks highlighting progress in space exploration and visualizations of our galaxy, and I’m thinking back to black holes – if we can measure things that are thousands of times the size of the sun and hundreds of thousands of light years (trillions of miles) away from us, how can anything on our own planet, such as in the ocean depths be termed an abyss? Nothing on this planet is truly bottomless with the only exception being our minds. Oh wait that was a movie, there is no such thing as an abyss on earth other than in our minds. There is no physical abyss on earth, every hole and canyon has a bottom, but there are 9 billion of us walking around with an intangible, alexithymic bottomless pit [alexithymia is a term to describe difficulty with feeling emotions, something many of us struggle with, and another of the many facets of mental illness]. Well, perhaps there is another abyss - my stomach and the insatiable, anxiety-driven, stress-eating appetite for which all the salt in the ocean concentrated into a few cassava chips or all the sugar in the world melted into a bag of gummy bears will not satisfy. While there may not be an alien village trench in my stomach like the one deep in the Caribbean sea from James Cameron’s Hollywood movie Abyss, there is someone or something in my belly with a horrible instability and unquenchable nature.
But we can easily be confused in life, like just a minute ago when I shoved two Swiffer pads into the dryer instead of those intoxicatingly, synthetic flower good-smelling Bounce dryer sheets. I am shocked kids haven’t found a way to get high off of those things, I know I have come close a few times. When I die, not that I want to be buried, as cemeteries are a tremendous waste of space, if I were to be buried, throw in a couple half-opened boxes of Bounce dryer sheets please, to go along with the sour patch kids and cool ranch doritos of course. And incinerate me please, please. And as easy as we can be confused, we can much more easily be distracted, like I am here (fully validating the latest theory of my ADD in addition to all the other mental shortcomings). I have a therapist-recommended book to examine, understand and verify this, Delivered from Distraction, written by two doctors with ADD themselves. They say if you can get through just half the book you DEFINITELY don’t have ADD. Classic. I’m told there’s also a few questionnaires or tests in the book to help gauge your level of in-attentiveness, I look forward to acing those.
I definitely aced a lot of tests back in my days, the one that sits first in my mind however was no school-related exam, but just a few short years ago when we needed an emotional support dog license for our 10-year-old dog Cooperberto (who had cancer and would never make a two-flight trip from Cali to Puerto Rico in the bottom of the plane for our move). On our househunting trip, I can vividly remember sitting on the steps outside of an apartment we were looking at in PR, humid-deathsweat-hot Caribbean day, salt-air breeze coming off of the Caribbean Sea just a few hundred yards away, all the palm frawns whispering to me. And there I sat on the phone with a random stranger, a certified therapist for PetFriends or CertaPet, asking me endless questions about my mental state. And I felt so good answering honestly, something I had never done in my life – expressed my true terrors and shortcomings to another for the first time. I did not embrace the real lesson from that test and simply put my mask back on. The interview didn’t go very long, I don’t think the therapist made it to page 2 of 4 on the survey before we were A+ certified and soon after Cooperberto made it back to his homeland of Puerto Rico with us on our last work assignment. I remember my wife coming out of the apartment and asking me how the interview went, I should have responded differently there. But I said, all good with a smile and we moved on. And for Coop, he did have a smooth business-class flight down to Puerto Rico a few weeks later, and another good 7 or 8 months. I did everything I could to make him happy, so that he went out a king. He was so far beyond a great companion, I owe him so much. He kept me alive, for I was the one who was not well. For so many years he brought me to so many happy places in my mind and heart, pulled me out of so many abysses. So, I took him to rest at one of our very happy places and that is where he is now and forever more, overlooking a beautiful cliff, beach and that same Caribbean sea with the sunrise greeting him every morning. It took all of me not to bury us both in that hole on the cliff, for that is exactly what I felt would be best. I was being more than truthful when I said that he calmed me, he kept me sane, he kept me alive, he brought me joy and the ability to go on. Things got more difficult for me after Cooperberto was gone, much, much more often I gazed down into abysses and over cliffs at a landing spot. And I never said a word about it, never asked for help, another occurrence of that horribly repeating mistake.
I was being pulled into a black hole in the center of my head, my sanity tight-roping on the event horizon of life and death. With a smile on, with a mask on, pathologically lying without saying a word. A bipolar existence in a bipolar life, the inside and the outside mismatched and the ups and the downs coming faster and harder until they pushed me out of orbit. But all of that is in the past, and everything leading up to this moment, got me to this moment. I am here and enough is enough. What pushes me forward is not myself, but many others who I now engage and embrace, finally. To truly see yourself, you need much more than a mirror, to find your way, you need much more than a map and a compass. To thrive, to survive, you need to embrace and utilize a network of tools and assets in the form of those around you.
For so long I was trapped inside my head like an M.C. Escher alternate reality, Relativity, my favorite work from my favorite of all artists growing up.
Relativity the work of art, depicts a world where the fundamental laws of physics and science do not apply, where gravity no longer grounds you. A world just like our minds. All the figures in the picture, look ordinary and happy, but they are faceless, identically outfitted but moving aimlessly in different directions, each representing an arc of thought in your mind, looking for the outside, seeking clarity and their way. The brilliance of the picture Relativity is the basis of three gravity sources which anchors all that you see in this alternate world. Three forces, three truths, just like the biological, emotional and sociocultural signals that provide the gravity of our minds. This is something I picked up as I dove into the understanding of how entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, not only governs the physical world we live in, but the concept is highly applicable to our mental state and also the connectivity between the physical world and our minds – where the reactions of one organism become an informational signal to others. Each of us has our biological make-up and its disposition, biases, etc.
To see a black hole is not a simple thing, to truly see into your mind, to avoid a mental health black hole is just the same. It took a group of 8, actually much more than that just to lay eyes on the shadow of Sagittarius A*.
It takes all of these telescopes stretched across continents and thousands of miles just to get a glimpse of the silhouette of a black hole, not to mention what it would take to understand it, or look inside. This is the perfect analogy or parallel for mental health and the galaxy in each of our heads. We have so much work to do.
Working together, these telescopes are able to see with much greater resolution and power than any one of them could individually. If they didn’t work together, we wouldn’t even see the silhouette….
And it takes more than machinery, we have over 300 scientists collaborating across the globe to make this accomplishment possible.
And at just one of the collaboration sites, there are 66 different antennas, so there is even more complexity involved than the simplified diagram indicates. Looking up at the stars we only begin to see a small bit of the complexity of the galaxy. Looking into the mirror we are in a similar place. With space and black holes, there is no inside or outside, no event horizon or true system boundary. There is a single system, a connected continuum, for which we are all a part of, with different galaxies, solar systems and planets. The same holds true for our society’s collective mental health. We can look at both on many different levels but the main takeaway is the way our inside make-up is linked to our external environment and our thoughts and feelings are all cycling, oscillating and evolving forward just as planets in orbit around a sun in a solar system, many solar systems moving collectively within a galaxy, and those galaxies making up the universe.
“We’ve been studying black holes for so long that sometimes it’s easy to forget that none of us has ever seen one,” National Science Foundation director France Cordova said today during a press conference announcing the team’s achievement, held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
“We are delighted to be able to report to you today that we have seen what we thought was unseeable,” added project director Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics. “What you are seeing is evidence of an event horizon … we now have visual evidence of a black hole.”
Seeing into the heart of our own galaxy turned out to be a bit more complicated than staring down the barrel of a black hole in the next galaxy cluster over, which is why M87’s portrait is out first.
Now that we have images and more data on both M87 and Sagittarius A, we can learn much more. And what we see is that differences in those two black holes is due to their unique environments and surroundings – the same can be said for all of us.
"We have two completely different types of galaxies and two very different black hole masses, but close to the edge of these black holes they look amazingly similar," said Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT Science Council and a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. "This tells us that general relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes."
Oh, and now there’s some super sunspot pointed at us….AR 3038 (not an AR-15 style assault rifle this time) if only we could focus on what is right in front of and inside our faces. Not to worry, the scientists who study our solar system believe we are not at risk, at least not due to sunspots and solar flares. No one would dare ask their opinion of anything on this world though, about our blind spots here.
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