Kids grow up fast next to black holes

Strange things happen when reading about spacetime. Time slows down. It takes five minutes to read one page. Sometimes it goes backwards. I reread and reread, to no avail. Then... time stops. I'm only halfway through On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory, and Newton's first law of inertia has prevented me from going any further. After three long Earth months, I’ve returned it to the library... for the second time. Honestly, has anyone ever finished it?

Let’s sum up the first half, because that’s all you’ll ever get. 

Time is relative. Old news, right? Well, it still gets me every time. How can people who live on mountains experience time faster than those at sea level? To put it scientifically, that’s bonkers.

The closer you are to a large mass, the slower time goes by relative to others. If you get too close to a black hole, so massive that not even light can escape, your kids will grow up and become older than you in a matter of minutes. That’s what happened to Matthew McConaughey in the movie Interstellar, and it nearly broke him. If you watched it, you’ll know: he cried a lot.

Sometimes it’s better not to know how spacetime works because, for the most part, we will never experience it. The time distortions we experience are too insignificant. We’re talking milli-milliseconds (yes, that’s my term).

We will most definitely never travel at the speed of light or even close to it. But let’s just say you could. Travelling at the fastest speed in the universe (it cannot be surpassed because Einstein said so), it would take over four years to reach the nearest star. And, yes, time would again slow down. As my grade nine science teacher relayed with perspiration rolling down his brow: “If you were to travel the speed of light away from the earth for a month and then return, the earth would have aged 1,000 years!!” Something like that. It theoretically makes time travel possible, but only if you plan to jump to the future.

While travelling at the speed of light, which is impossible given our mass, time would in fact stop. You’ve traded distance completely for time. Don’t ask me how it works. It's a trade-off: the faster you travel, the less you age.

This is Einstein’s theory of relativity in a nutshell. Very unintuitive. He broke Newtonian physics... and my mind.

Yet he didn’t know it all. Back in 1915, when he broke the news that your feet age slower than your head, he thought the universe was static. It was a Belgian Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre who in 1927 proposed that the universe was in fact expanding. Both Einstein and Arthur Eddington, the man who helped prove Einstein's theory of relativity, poo-pooed the theory of this religious man and, in the end, were proven wrong.

That’s right, a Catholic priest was more open to the idea of a dynamic universe than Einstein himself. With the help of a man named Hubble, the famous telescope guy who didn’t believe in an expanding universe either, he proved that a distant nebula was in fact moving away from us. This was in 1929, before iPhones were invented.

But that was not all. Lemaitre also came up with the theory of the Big Bang – back then, called the Primeval Atom. Not bad for a Catholic priest.

So what was left to discover? Black holes, of course. Even though the idea of a black hole was hypothesized way back in 1783, they were only "proven" over the course of the 20^th century. Black holes are so dense that they suck everything in, even light, which makes them hard to see.

Then came along a man named Stephen Hawking, the focus of this book I'm about halfway through. Stricken by a crippling disease at a young age that left him physically immobile, it never affected his brilliant mind nor his ability to have kids (just thought I’d throw that in there). He proved that black holes were not just sucking everything in, but also spewing out "information" or, as I like to call it, black hole spit up. Hawking radiation is now the official term.

Interestingly, he also suggested that one plus one may not equal two in a black hole… and, if you carry the one, it might actually slip out of the black hole – you know, as radiation. I made that last part up, but the bottom line is that our understanding of general relativity, as we know it, may not exist as you enter a black hole, the so-called point of no return.

Hawking drew parallels with black holes and the Big Bang, which may or may not hold water. It’s difficult to prove something, after all, that happened 13.8 billion years ago. There were no cameras back then.

He theorized that the laws of physics evolved over time. In a very short time, like the first milli-milliseconds of our universe’s existence, everything changed. Just as the laws of physics break down in a black hole, so too did they “break down” in the very instant when the universe began.

I may or may not be describing these concepts correctly, but feel free to read the first half of the book to prove me wrong.

It's waiting in the library.

Wealthy need our attention, too

 

Every once in a while, I like to check in on the richest people in the world. Just to see how they’re doing. Are they eating properly? Are they taking their meds? (No, not those meds, Elon.)

 Obviously, I’m checking in on their financial well-being. How much are they worth today and how does that make them feel? Online, we can now track their fortunes as they change by the minute. For some commoners like me, it's a cheap thrill (no pun intended).

So who are these humble billionaires? The top 10 richest people consist primarily of whom I’ll call The Techies – the Google, Amazon and Facebook founders. The next Top 10 are a little less interesting, whom I’ll call Old (and some new) Money, including the owners of mining companies, crypto currencies and major corporations like Walmart. 

For the most part, other than Elon Musk (we’ll get to him), they’re fairly boring people. But if you go a bit further down, into the lowly 40s, you’ll find someone a little more relatable. Here you will find the humble founder of Nutella. That’s right, the man who invented the creamy hazelnut chocolate spread I like to apply to my bananas to make them more edible. Maybe I don’t know if he actually invented the product, but it says Nutella under his name and so I can only assume he holds the rights to this absolute kitchen-cupboard essential! 

His name is Giovanni Ferraro and so, naturally, he also owns the rights to Ferraro chocolates, which my wife ranks #1 in chocolates.

Now perhaps it’s because he’s a simple chocolatier, but he seems (and looks) more human than the other billionaires. While I have no idea what he’s like in real life, he’s got to be more likable than Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who limits bathroom breaks for his warehouse employees, or Elon Musk, who has become a full-time tweeting machine, now valued at nearly a trillion dollars.

A trillion dollars!! Musk’s immense wealth would be maddening if it wasn’t so disgusting. While he has done some innovative things in his life, namely creating a cool electric car, he has done very little as of late to double his fortune in the last year.

Why do I say this? Because he’s barely working! He tweets on average thirty times a day on his platform X, he played top bureaucrat in the Trump administration for four months straight, and he's allegedly addicted to Ketamine, a drug that can cause hallucinations and illusions of grandeur (I'm guessing).

His net worth does not compute, unless you understand that money makes money. For decades, the value of capital has outpaced the value of labour – i.e. those of us who don’t own private jets. What’s helped the rich to become even richer is the fact that capital – including gains in the stock market – is taxed at a lower rate than most working peoples’ wages. It’s a great time to be a trillionaire!

The wealthiest people in the world are typically talented, hard-working people, but at some point, it’s all about compound interest. Mr. Ferraro stepped down as CEO in 2017 at the age of 55, but he still makes enough money to be the 41st richest person in the world. In fact, he moved from 49th to 41st richest in one month just by sitting around, keeping his money invested.

Even the divorcees are killing it. Bill and Melinda Gates’ divorce was the most expensive in history at $67 billion. Next came Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos’ divorce at $38 billion. This is still a relatively small fraction of their wealth, and you’ll be happy to know, each of these men is still in the top 20.

Unfortunately, none of the top 10 richest people are women and only one woman – a daughter of Same Walton, interestingly labelled as the only “philanthropist” – is in the top 20. It’s still a man’s world when it comes to ridiculous amounts of wealth.

And it’s not like they’re sharing their wealth with the rest of the world. They may have their pet projects (to his credit, Bill Gates has more than any of them), but most wealthy people are not much different than when they were non-wealthy. For many, it’s ambition and greed that has made them who they are today, and they remain, well, greedy. 

For Musk, it’s more than greed; he's acted with malice. While working for the Trump administration, he hurt the poorest in the world by gutting American foreign aid, cutting funding for vaccines, food assistance, and environmental programs. 

This is capitalism run amuck. The rich controlling the levers of government spending. With so much money, they also feel entitled to political power.

Our nephew, who grew up living frugally in Ukraine but now lives in Canada, was often amused by the excesses of North American living. “Welcome to capitalism!” he would say, jokingly, at small things like me owning two fifty-inch TVs (hey, why not?). For him, life in Canada meant better economic prospects and an opportunity to own “capital”, even if that only means owning your own car and home, with a couple big TVs to boot.

But that’s it. That’s what most of us have, if that. We do not own our own private jets, nor should we.

Capitalism has created more wealth than ever before, pulling millions out of poverty worldwide, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to make the world a little more equitable.

For myself, it could start by paying less attention to the richest men in the world, and a little more to the poorest. Sigh. I suppose Elon doesn’t really need any more attention.

Elon finally makes it to Mars