Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes

Like an electric dynamo, this black hole spins and pumps energy out through cable-like magnetic field lines into the chaotic gas whipping around it. Photograph: EPA A black hole is creation's end point, a one-way exit from the universe, an enclosed region of spacetime from which nothing can escape. Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes

In that sense, black holes are neither here nor there. In practical terms, however, these death stars are everywhere and may mean everything to us. There is even a tiny one – a piffling four million times as massive as the Sun – at the heart of the Milky Way, the galaxy we call home. Cambridge scientists announced in October that they had peered through cosmic clouds of dust in the very early universe to identify a new population of supermassive black holes – one of them is 10 billion times more massive than the Sun – at a distance of 11 billion light years. The paradox is that, while the forces within the invisible enclosure of a black hole are so fierce that nothing, not even light, can get out, these dark stars are also the most radiant things in the universe. Karl Schwarzschild, a German mathematician and, in 1915, a gunner on the Russian front, worked out the way space and time would be distorted around a massive spherical object. The event horizon, the point beyond which light cannot escape, is now formally called the Schwarzschild radius. This was more than 70 years before a single black hole had been identified. A spinning, supermassive black hole is a kind of cosmic-scale battery, says Caleb Scharf: it can produce a pole-to-equator difference of a thousand trillion volts, it can propel the tenuous matter swirling around its devouring maw to relativistic speeds and deliver what is still called a quasar – an electromagnetic outpouring equivalent to the light from 1000 billion Suns. It is the most efficient converter of energy in the cosmos. It can also puff slow, pulsating bubbles of inaudible sound through the vast galactic cloud around it, "57 octaves below B flat above middle C in case you were curious. That's approximately 300,000 trillion times lower in frequency than the human voice … Supermassive black holes can make you a very, very nice sound system." Scharf heads an astrobiology research team at Columbia University in New York, and his thesis is that the biggest black holes serve as cosmic regulators: that they control the production of stars in the great clouds of gas and dust from which, ultimately, all stars and planets must condense. It could also be the wild card, the joker, the blind, haphazard agency that decides whether a galaxy has any future for photochemistry, organic chemistry, and ultimately, sustained biochemistry on some randomly ordered rocky planet with running water, reasonably near its parent star in some quiet galactic suburb. The Milky Way, says Scharf, is "smack-dab in the sweet-spot of massive supermassive black hole activity. It is possible that this is not mere coincidence." And once again, this heady story of astronomical endeavour and cosmic conjecture prompts a happy mix of marvels. Consider, for example, the gravitational forces acting on a neutron star, an ultradense object one step from total collapse into a singularity or black hole. To escape from Earth's gravitational field, you need a rocket speed of about eight miles a second. To get away from a neutron star, the rocket must accelerate to 62,000 miles a second. If you dived from a springboard one metre above its surface, you would hit the ground at 1,200 miles a second. Drop into a black hole, however, and you'd slam through the point of no return at virtually the speed of light. The other paradox of these unimaginable objects is that somebody first had to imagine them. John Michell, a British pioneer of earthquake science in 1783 followed the logic of Newton's theory of gravity and proposed a dark star, a star so massive its own light would return to it. The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace separately arrived at the same reasoning a decade later. Albert Einstein began to explore the way a massive star might distort the fabric of the universe around it.

There are 100 billion galaxies out there in the farthest cosmos, each containing at least 100 billion stars. Some of these are spiral galaxies, and the only life we know about exists on the outer limb of one spiral galaxy with a relatively quiet black hole at its heart. So the argument is tentative: with a sample of one, what else could it be? But that's the allure of cosmology. It offers the ghost of a possibility of an answer to the eternal question: how did we get here?

And that's the other delight of this book, and all such accounts of discovery. They offer a reminder that, given an understanding of mathematical logic and some lenses with which to make a telescope, one accidental species on one inconsequential speck of matter in the 14 billionth year of the universe has been able to identify a few testable laws that govern matter and energy, and from these, and with an arsenal of ever more ingenious telescopes, build up a picture of things that happened far away and long ago, and from that begin to construct a story of everything. The story is provisional. The next generation of space-based and earth-bound telescopes will almost certainly reveal ever more amazing things, with ever greater precision. Who needs another series of Star Wars movies, when the universal studios can go on delivering excitement on this scale? Рlease write comment on my blog!

Jonathan Miller:

In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller by Kate Bassett – review Andrew Dickson on an unquestioning life of a much-lampooned polymath Jonathan Miller: famously sharp-tongued. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian In Jonathan Miller's brilliant, bubblegum-pink 2010 reimagining of L'elisir d'amore for English National Opera, there was a moment that caused bel canto purists to clutch for their heart pills. It came – from memory – early on. Adina, the heroine, was reading aloud from the story of Tristan when the orchestra abruptly abandoned Donizetti's delicate oom-pah-pah and lobbed in 19th-century music's most notorious hand grenade: Wagner's Tristan chord. It was a joke, but a serious one: half schoolboy prank, half learned footnote. If you could enjoy a gag this highbrow, it was also shamelessly funny. In Two Minds: a Biography of Jonathan Miller by Kate Bassett

Miller adores the element of surprise, and not only on stage. Impressionist and satirist; raconteur and chatshow darling; director and producer of opera, theatre and TV; quondam boss of the Old Vic; presenter, author and scriptwriter; lecturer, curator, artist – a dizzying life, and that's putting to one side his training as a doctor, which has impelled projects as varied as a BBC series on the history of medicine, The Body in Question (1978), and medically exact productions of Così fan tutte. A zealous non-believer, he has produced a shattering version of the Matthew Passion; riffed casually on his own Jewishness ("not really a Jew … Jew-ish") yet also staged one of the most thoughtful examinations of that faith in living theatrical memory – his 1970 Merchant of Venice with Laurence Olivier, performed as Miller's own father, a devout Jew, lay dying. As Kate Bassett's thorough, well-upholstered new biography makes plain, Miller contains multitudes. More than perhaps even he is aware of. He was born into, if not quite greatness, then the heavy expectation that he would achieve it. His father Emanuel was a well-regarded child psychiatrist; his mother, Betty, a novelist and biographer. Miller fils, somehow appropriately, didn't wait until birth to make his literary debut – making a cameo, Bassett suggests, as an unborn child in one of his mother's stories. The cultured milieu of his north London childhood is hinted at by the fact that Stevie Smith once wrote a satirical piece about his family (Bassett calls Smith's accompanying poem "vile"). It was to science that the young Miller was drawn: first at St Paul's school – pals included Oliver Sacks and book-dealer Eric Korn – then at Cambridge. But almost as soon as he began his medical studies, the "cocaine-like" addiction of performing was working away: skits at school and university, then, after graduation, the astonishing success of Beyond the Fringe – a quartet, it's pleasing to be reminded, that was assembled by a young theatre producer, as coldly manufactured as any boyband. Miller's later claims that his career has been largely happenstance are cast into relief by a letter he wrote at the age of 18 to the BBC requesting a TV audition, explaining that he and a friend "specialise in parodies of Radio, films and theatre and also 'REAL LIFE'" (the request was turned down).

Bassett's thesis is encapsulated in her title, and she spends much time examining, then re-examining, Miller's bursts of spirited indecision about what to do with his talents – no sooner promising to knuckle down to medicine before scarpering towards the footlights; no sooner triumphing in theatre before announcing a penitential progress back towards science. Bassett makes the fine point that doctoring and directing aren't perhaps so different, over and above simply requiring theatres. Ibsen, Chekhov, Goldsmith, Strindberg and Schiller all received medical training, and you could argue that both disciplines involve careful performance rituals and a degree of flamboyant mystification. Both also call for deep involvement in human problems; and practitioners of both kinds sometimes fancy they have the god-like ability to transcend them (even if, as Miller discovered, the West End proved more tempting than ward rounds at UCH).

This, alas, is the frustration of In Two Minds, which gives the recurring impression of leading its subject towards the psychologist's couch without ever eliciting sustained or meaningful analysis. Miller's relationship with his sister Sarah receives minimal treatment, his children feature largely as a support act; give or take the odd hint, the realities of his 56-year marriage are placed discreetly behind a curtain (his wife Rachel is a GP, and some of the professional challenges she's had to face sound a good deal tougher than her husband's). We are halfway through the book before we discover that Miller has suffered from depression: the discussion of how that illness has manifested, or coloured his work, lasts less than a page. Although Miller seems to have realised he is ill-equipped for the slog of medical research (something it apparently took a £88,00 grant in the 1980s at Sussex University to demonstrate), his dividedness persists, as evidenced by numerous declarations that his directing career is over – he has enjoyed more curtain calls than the most prima of prima donnas. It is typical – also somehow heartbreaking – that, not content with being a hobbying sculptor, Miller rather fancies installing what is described as a "large-scale work" outside Waterloo station. This isn't common-or-garden hypercompetitiveness; it seems to be a kind of mania, on a literally architectural scale.

Being in two minds about one's career is one thing; the more interesting question, surely, is how the schisms in Miller's own mind fit – or don't fit – together. Which of his personalities does one believe? The kindly friend who helps a colleague move house, or the man who cuts former acquaintances dead for daring to contradict him? The workaholic professional, or the one who abandons rehearsals when they aren't going his way? Vice-president of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, or the man who cracks jokes about "opera queens"? The nuclear-powered controversialist? The penseur and philosophe? The licensed fool?&&&&&&& Bassett's acknowledgments say that Miller himself has not read or edited any of the manuscript; he hardly needed to, such is the flood of his talk that courses through it. Hefty verbatim quotes form its substance, and even ostensibly independent opinions (that telling "vile"; leitmotifs on his parents' lack of affection, an odd tic to do with never having earned enough) have the tang of indirect speech. Sometimes this is innocuous enough – and often it's entertaining, Miller's tongue being famously sharp – but despite Bassett's attempts at balance, the suspicion grows that we are being drip-fed the subject's own insights into himself. Richard Holmes once compared the biographer's task to snooping on a dinner party where the guests are permanently out of earshot; Bassett brings us right to the table, but seems anxious about offending the host.

Bassett is herself a fine, fierce theatre critic – her write-ups of Miller's productions have verve and perceptive grace – so it is a shame that, when it comes to the great man, she too often abandons her critical distance, notably in a final section that marshals witnesses for the defence (John Fortune: "If he'd been born French, there would be streets named after him"; the historian Michael Wood: "the most scintillating and inspiring teacher … bollocks to those who think otherwise"). Alan Bennett, a long-term neighbour as well as family friend, is more wary: "We've always gone on the assumption that the less I said about him and the less he said about me the better."

In the end, perhaps one of the most revealing character sketches here is a short section on Private Eye, which for some years ran a column called "The Life of Dr Jonathan", casting Miller ("the Great Doctor") as a latterday Johnson, dilating at length to "importunate savants" on "topics too awful and profound to bear thinking of". In the backhanded way of British satire, it's as close as Lord Gnome's organ has ever come to unadorned compliment. Miller, naturally, cannot see the funny side.

Les Dawson's Joke Book: review

Les Dawson's mother-in-law jokes overshadowed some of his imaginative wordplay, as this new book of jokes shows. One of Les Dawson's 1970s quips - "The way prices are rising, the good old days are last week" - will unfortunately rarely be outmoded. Humour is timeless. It will be 20 years next June since the comedian died, at the age of 62, and in advance comes Les Dawson's Joke Book.There are one-liners, handwritten sketches - including an amusing ditty about the First World War - and limericks.

There are plenty of jokes. Do they stand the test of time? Lots do, but some - about 'Red Indians', Tarzan and trade unionists - may really resonate only among an older audience. And it was a very poor decision to include a joke about a rapist. As someone who had a mother-in-law and a step mother-in-law, I may not best placed to consider the PC merits of the ample number of Dawson's mother-in-law jokes in a book compiled by his wife Tracy and daughter Charlotte. A typical example is: "My mother-in-law's so fat that when she passes her handbag from hand to hand she throws it". As it happens, it was always the offbeat and imaginative flights of fancy I liked best with Dawson. Here are some examples from the book: • 'My lad chewed and swallowed a dictionary. We gave him Epsom salts - but we can't get a word out of him.' • A duck goes into a chemist's shop. 'A tube of lipsol, please.' The chemist said: 'Certainly. That'll be 50 pence.' 'Just put it on my bill.' • 'I'll give you 40 pills in a box.' 'Thanks, it's hopeless trying to roll them home.' • 'I said to the wife, I wish you wouldn't smoke in bed.' She said: 'But a lot of women do.' I said, 'Not bacon, they don't.' • 'I discovered the wife's got asthma. Thank God - I thought she was hissing at me.'

• 'I wouldn't say they were posh but the toilet coughed before it flushed.' The book will certainly appeal to Les Dawson fans and those tickled by (funny) jokes such as: 'I went to my doctor and asked for something for persistent wind. He gave me a kite.'