The Ant and the Black Hole

I was watching an ant cross my wood deck and climb onto an adjacent tree where he disappeared around the side, and it occurred to me that the ant can’t possibly understand the tree as we do.

We see the tree grow every year and bend in the wind, and possibly even witness its demise from old age. But an ant’s lifetime is too short to see the sixty years that a tree grows, lives and dies; nor can the ant see how the forest of trees changes from year to year like we do.

The ant is limited in his understanding of trees by his time on Earth … but the same is true for people ... our time on Earth limits what we can see and understand about the universe surrounding our lives.

Imagine, even if the ant could see the life of a tree like we do, it would still be impossible for him to understand that my wood deck is made from trees, after all the ant has never been to a sawmill … and it makes me wonder, sitting here on our little planet, what sawmills we can’t see? What do black holes do anyway?


Gene Haynes