With a smirk, Stephen Hawking tells folks
His raunchy singularity jokes,
With time dilation effects
On event horizon sex,
And what observers make of those slow pokes.
See also this limerick’s Cosmologists companion pieces:
Don’t get him started on naked singularities! A burned-out star that collapses in on itself under its own intense gravity becomes a black hole that curves space-time itself. According to Hawking’s early thinking, a black hole contains a huge amount of mass in an infinitely small space. This point is called a singularity. The event horizon is the theoretical boundary surrounding a black hole beyond which nothing can escape its gravity well, not even light or other radiation. To a remote observer watching (sexual) events unfold there, time would appear to slow to the point of stopping. It would seem that our intrepid lovers would never tumble into the core—or, perhaps, never achieve orgasm. Of course, loop quantum gravity theory, which attempts to bridge quantum mechanics and general relativity, posits that singularities may not exist inside black holes after all. Bottom line: it’s all speculation; nobody knows for sure, not even smartypants Stephen Hawking.
