The Largest Black Holes in the Universe: A Visual Introduction

I wrote this in 2010, after try­ing to explain this to my kids
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Cos­mol­o­gy. Sun­day Oct 17, 2010

What is there, where there isn’t any space?
The ques­tion was my daugh­ter’s, yes­ter­day.
I groped for con­text: noth­ing com­mon­place
Would work (“Ya mean yer room?”) — the ev’ry­day
Was not her sub­ject. “Do you mean to ask,
The nowhere, where the uni­verse is not?”
And she assent­ed. Now I had the task,
With just the lit­tle knowl­edge that I’ve got,
Of keep­ing her from twist­ing in a knot.

“There’s noth­ing, love. There isn’t even Where.”
(I knew it was­n’t going well already.)

“But where are WE? And if there’s noth­ing there,
Then what IS there?” (She held her the­sis steady.)

“I told you how the uni­verse was made,
Remem­ber? From a sin­gu­lar­i­ty?”

She thought a moment, utter­ly unswayed,
And asked, “Where was it? Out, just float­ing free?”

“There was­n’t any Where to float out­side.”
The Where was all inside. The Bang began…”

And then my son, who’s younger, tried to hide;
The con­cept of a real, and finite span
That space­time might one day have lived and died
Is more to ask, of such a lit­tle man,
Than he can hear today. His sis­ter can.
She’s work­ing out the cos­mos’ greater plan.