luna - elna

trust that everything will fall into place without you forcing it there.

cthulhu

Black holes are the ultimate astronomical phenomena. They are regions where the very structure of reality is contorted into something alien. Defined not by substance but by the warping of spacetime, a black hole is a solution to Einstein’s field equations wherein the metric tensor collapses into a singularity—an infinitesimal point of infinite density, where curvature diverges and our mathematical descriptions disintegrate. The event horizon, delineated by the Schwarzschild radius , marks a boundary beyond which causal relationships cease to propagate outward. Nothing—not matter, not light, not information—can escape. From within, the geometry of spacetime becomes so distorted that all paths, all timelike geodesics, inevitably lead inward, like water down an infinite drain.

Time bizzarelt dilates near the horizon; a distant observer would see infalling matter slow, redshift, and fade, asymptotically frozen in time, somewhat like a hologram eternally flickering at the border. Simultaneously for the falling observer, however, the descent is finite and inexorable as space collapses inward, and the singularity looms in a finite proper time. Should one hypothetically remain on the event horizon itself, a null surface traversed only at the speed of light, the geometry becomes especially... strange: light emitted tangentially could orbit indefinitely along the photon sphere, forming a closed loop. So in this scenario, were you to gaze precisely forward, the curvature would distort light rays around the hole to the point you'd witness the back of your own head—an optical recursion born not of mirrors but of warped topology.

You know Franciso de Goya? Yeah that Goya. The one who painted "saturn devouring his son" and the other 13 of what are called his "black paintings", which are dark, creepy, and while you might not know all the other ones, if you only vaguely recognise the name Goya, the first image to pop into your head is probably this one:

Unless you've got an art history degree. This post isn't aimed at people with an art history degree. Anyway, those of you who aren't into art history probably only vaguely know the story, of how he was a painter and these 14 were his private paintings, only painted for himself, not commissioned by a customer and never intended to be publicly displayed. People were shocked when they were first discovered, due to how starkly different they were from his other, more traditional and conventional paintings.

This is the part I want you to meditate on: Goya also made plenty of normal art for normal people. A whole bunch of perfectly normal paintings.