Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Humor Essay: Evan
The Most Expensive Black Hole Ever (Has Just Swallowed Your Futon)
by Evan Eilers
The ultra-smart scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have finally come up with a way to get rid of all that excess gold that has been piling up and taking up space in bank vaults around the world. Bankers will at last have enough room to play ultimate Frisbee indoors, or, if they have a long enough hose, turn the unused vaults into ice skating rinks. The question you are now asking yourself has a very simple answer: no, the bankers will not charge money to go ice skating in their vaults.
The other question you are asking yourself—“where did all that useless gold go?”- has a much shorter but only slightly less interesting answer: nowhere. It’s gone, departed, vanished, disappeared, not here, moved out, absent without leave-or at least it will be if the Brookhaven eggheads ever figure out how to get rid of more than two atoms of gold at a time. You are probably now thinking: “why do you keep guessing at what I’m thinking and can I get rid of two gold atoms which have been loitering around my mailbox using common household items?” The answers to these questions are: “because it’s fun” and “not unless you have Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider sitting around next to your lawn mower in the garage.” In case you’re wondering if that pile of scrap metal parked in your garage gathering dust and proving that rust can rust is a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider - it isn’t – that would be your car.
To those of you who are determined to vaporize gold atoms here is a simple six step plan.
1. Go out and buy yourself a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. (E-bay always has great deals.)
2. Find two gold atoms. (If you’re having trouble finding some, try looking in those crowded bank vaults.)
3. Strip each of the atoms of their 79 electrons. (This can be extremely difficult if done by hand, you could ask politely for them to leave or forcibly remove them with tweezers.)
4. Send the atoms careening towards each other at 99.995 percent of the speed of light. (This is where the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider comes into play - unless you have the arm strength and impeccable aiming to staple one atom to a wall and then lob the other directly into the first atom at mind-numbing, jaw-dropping, looks-of-awe-inducing speeds. It doesn’t work, I’ve tried.)
5. Stand around awkwardly with a befuddled look on your face because the atoms have just suffered total existence failure as they get sucked into a black hole wannabe created by their nuclear fender-bender and the resulting trillion degree explosion. (If you think that’s really hot, just imagine what the gold atoms felt like just before they got yanked into oblivion.)
6. Quickly run and get a stop-watch to time how long the black hole wannabe lasts. (we’ll just call it a gold hole from now on, just because it’s shorter and easier to type) Never mind, it’ll be gone by the time you can even try to start to begin attempting to read the above sentence. The scientists at Brookhaven have only gotten it to last “less than 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second” according to the New York Times. How they managed to measure that small of an amount of time with nothing but advanced sensor equipment and futuristic supercomputers is a question that may never be answered.
If the Brookhaven nerds could ever manage to get a gold hole to last for a significant amount of time and get it a little bigger – possibly by upgrading from atoms of gold to bricks of gold - thousands of careers would open up in the field of thinkingofwhattodowithgoldholesiology. Unfortunately, most professionals in this field would come up with using gold holes as a place to dump stuff and then immediately run out of ideas.
Never having to take out the garbage again is a tempting prospect at first, but you might change your mind when assorted appliances start whizzing by your head on their way to the gold hole hovering menacingly under the kitchen sink. Constantly replacing your toaster would eventually become slightly cost prohibitive after having accidentally thrown out your last three houses with the trash. After the fourth house and your 47th quesadilla maker have been converted into radiation by the world’s most expensive, efficient, and dangerous garbage disposal, you might start to realize that, like milk that has been given a month to putrefy, a gold hole isn’t the best thing to keep in the house – or even within several miles of the house – or better yet, keep it in a different state. I hear that Nebraska has lots of open space this time of year.
Once a nice gold hole has had time to settle down in ultra-rural Nebraska, we can start flinging garbage into it from a safe distance with the use of very large catapults. Barrels of toxic waste, piles of junk mail, totaled cars, jugs of putrefied milk, surplus lawyers, previously used Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliders, baby diapers, outdated computers from last week, and whatever else needs throwing out would find a new home in the bowels of nothingness. All we need to do is to find enough gold to smash together and an extra-large Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to do the smashing and then we will have all the empty bank vaults to frolic in that we could ever want or possibly need. I always liked silver better anyway.
Works Cited
Chang, Kenneth. “In Lab’s High-Speed Collisions, Things Just Vanish.” New York Times 29 Mar. 2005. 6 Apr. 2005
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