There are many ways to measure the course of human history and each will give an insight into one or more of the various qualities that have made us the most successful great ape. Every major advance, whether in war or art or literature, requires imagination, that most amazing of human capacities, and the ability to ask ‘What if?’ – to take the world from a different perspective.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of science. While there is an inherent provincialism in revolutions in art and literature, progress in science is universal, and moves, like Dante’s Hell, in concentric circles of ever deeper understanding. It is the story of human imagination; the progressive casting off of the chains of ignorance, freeing us from our lowly origins and guiding us to Paradise.
Perhaps the greatest revision in our understanding of the universe was Einstein’s discovery that time is just as relative as anything else; and that there should exist points in space with zero volume and infinite density, where time freezes and space stretches out to infinity – black holes. We now have empirical evidence for these wonders, yet despite this comforting reassurance in the scientific method, all the mystery still remains. That they exist means that the breakdown of physics they represent is correct; and the leap of imagination required to explain this is still ahead of us.
This necessary moment of inspiration is the theme of the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s White Holes, in which he offers to guide us, ‘like Virgil did Dante… to the edge of a black hole’s horizon… down to the bottom, cross through and emerge into a white hole where time is reversed, then go up until we see the stars again’.
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