2025-2026, Borgesian Fiction

"The Schwarzschild Folly" – Oliver Wang '26

Our home revolves around a healthy star, its radiance shining every day on me with a stable warmth, a warmth that is however, usurped by the presence of a dark sphere in the sky that distorts the images around it, an empty orb in the celestials about the size of our moon. Just like all inhabitants in our home world, I have wondered what that was in my childhood, and just as any other parent, I would be told that it is the astronomical entity known as both the Great Void or simply Ghroth, a dark, ominous complement of our sun. I grew up in both its darkness and the sun’s radiance, and as I got educated, I learned that people had other names and perceptions of this entity. 

In my youth I learned as early as 3,000 years ago, celestial cults emerged, emphasizing the balance between light and darkness, with the two celestial bodies, the sun and the Great Void, as symbols - Daoism. In classic philosophy, Plato theorized a transcendent, perfect form of the world, and he pointed out the sun, ever changing in brightness and warmth between seasons, is in our real world, inferior in perfection than the forever still great void - perfectly round and dark, which exists in the ideal world. The inventors of the compass, the ancient engineers of my oriental homeland, would also use the Great Void as a benchmark for maritime navigation. In modern philosophy, the sun was noted, by Nietzsche, to be an avatar of Apollo, and a symbol of wakefulness, order and logic; the Great Void was noted to be an avatar of Dionysus, a symbol of unobservable madness, chaos and inspiration (he only gave me an insight. His metaphor of chaos will be proved wrong astronomically, then proved right again - I will explain soon). Unlike what my parents taught me, I learned the Great Void was more respected than feared in history: it is less of an abomination but more of a cultural symbol. I grew up loving the Great Void’s connection with perfection and inspiration. 

However, the common worldview changed when Einstein published his equations. Soon scientists inferred that an astronomical body named the black hole should exist somewhere in the universe. At once, people shifted even more attention to the Great Void; the distortions around it when people gazed up at it matched perfectly with gravitational light distortion as predicted by general relativity. It proved Einstein’s point with its mere existence. This happened when I was at the age of 9; by then, there were a few years of fear for the Great Void as more people addressed it with the more negative name, Ghroth. I however was unshaken by public fear. Instead, in my youth I dug into the deepest parts of the library searching for resources related to the history and culture of the Great Void, and bought astronomical magazines. I attended college in the theoretical astrophysics major, and luckily for me the Black Hole Rush was not yet over. The scholars just finished making the preliminary efforts of studying the Great Void. Instruments before this time period were, though capable of studying stars and planets, unable to gain much information about the Great Void. The year that I graduated from college, the first space probe was launched. When I earned my position at my Alma Master as chief library archivist and theoretical astrophysics professor, engineers from the other side of the world launched a grand, sophisticated telescope into space. When they peered into the deep field of the Great Void, they also saw no ripples or anything imperfect in its darkness.

I have read all the books in the library I manage, from the Mohism texts of utility and engineering by Mo Zi to the stunning philosophies of Herman Hesse, and the stoic writings of Marcus Aurelius, and from the ancient astronomical inscriptions of Aztec and Egyptian civilizations to the findings of Hawking. In essence, the entirety of human civilization has been looking for an answer to life, the universe and everything. The answer is not 42, as proposed by Douglas Adams, but throughout history and science we have always looked to the Great Void as the ideal definition of perfection. As my age grew my frenzied desire for the Great Void did not vanish but propagated through all my neurons. I have always been fascinated by the black hole model made by Karl Schwarzschild, the solver of Einstein’s field equations. By chance my mother gave me the same name as him, but unfortunately he has long passed. In his theory, the black hole is an idealized Schwarzschild black hole that, unlike Reissner–Nordström, Kerr or Kerr-Newman, is a black hole that is perfectly round, eternal, not charged and not rotating - perfection. And by all measurements humanity has done in orbit and on the ground, our Great Void is as perfect as the Schwarzschild black hole. We are fortunate: nothing is exerting too much influence on our Great void. Our small solar system revolves around it in a perfectly circular orbit, and everything else that revolves around it is in perfect orbit as well. This is perfection, satisfaction, but not enough. The true answer, the m-theory, must lie in the Great Void itself.

In later years, after I was offered a tenure at my Alma Mater, I was invited to be an astronaut originally planned to visit a gas giant. Later, considering my expertise in black holes and my complaints, I was shifted to a first mission soaring past the Great Void and back, so as to study its surface from up close. I was simultaneously given an arch-researcher position in the large spacecraft’s research deck. The day I was carried by a shuttle into the space station’s port, I took my first peer to the pristine black void and the even darker orb in it that I have always gazed at. The space station was not so orderly, with always some fluids (perhaps water) floating around sections without artificial gravity. During the several years of flying in space, I watched news and television less and less, talked less, and even read less. I spent increasingly more time gazing into the far fields, into Ghroth. In ancient myths, the name Ghroth means the nemesis star, originally a sigil of end and destruction. In my mind the duality of perfection and ultimate universal order, and the symbol of ending - perhaps for me, perhaps for humanity’s science - lies in the black star.

And now, I shall tell you, witness, why I named this recording Folly of Schwarzschild, not Great Accomplishment, Eureka or Miracle. A few years after we left, we reached the safe orbit of the Great Void. Beyond a specific point of time (which is no longer relevant to me) when the great dark eye occupied the entirety of my room window, I was hallucinating a dream, in which I sank into a dark ocean at a beach of black sand, and underneath it I rested for an eternity dreaming the tides and life of this black sea into existence. When I woke up it all shattered. My Solaris was gone. My Ghroth replaced it. Seduced, I went for an unauthorized space walk when we reached our proximity point on our journey to the black hole, when others were busy observing and collecting data. I jumped into the infinite abyss.

Let me explain to you why what happened next would happen. The edge of the black hole is more defined than a star, known as the event horizon. The event horizon is the spherical boundary that marks exactly the point that light no longer can escape the black hole’s gravity. Therefore anything that falls beyond the horizon is bound, in the far future, to reach the singularity of the black hole, which is an undefined point in time and space that anything that falls into the black hole is bound to reach. In a perfect Schwarzschild black hole like this, this process is fixed and eternally unchanging. Anything that falls into the horizon is bound to have the same fate - a predictable, foreseeable fate - a solution to mankind’s concerns of an unpredictable future, an eternal problem in our history. This process is sometimes called the causal structure flip, because after this flip happens when the horizon is crossed, time inevitably points to the singularity. Therefore, by this means, we can predict the future. By this means, we could be in a way omniscient.

Falling into a large-mass black hole is, I would say, much less violent an experience than falling into a small one. Larger black holes, unlike small ones, would not force the object to experience drastically different tidal forces (gravitational pull) head and toe, tearing them apart in such a process. The Great Void is enormous, and it is as gentle as my homeland’s sun. My crossing of the event horizon was smooth and harmless; when the singular light-absorbing sphere finally encompassed the entirety of my sight - I was unable to turn myself around, in its absolute pull - and at an indescribable moment I crossed the horizon. I felt nothing when I vanished into it, but now I have ample time to do some computations,to mathematically confirm my subject time that I entered the horizon (since now I have my own time standards within the horizon, different from that of outside). My colleagues on the space station would now see the last moment before I fell into the horizon eternally on the horizon - for that the last seconds of light I reflected would move so unbearably slowly away from the Great Void. 

I have made certain that humanity on the outside has noticed my disappearance and put interest in me. According to my clock some three minutes after I fell into the horizon a message reached my exosuit interface, several gigabytes of updates on human civilization, my family (several generations have passed, due to the fast time speed within the black hole) and the current situation of the black hole, observed from the outside realm. These are all minor news for me, or simply entertainment. After all, now that I am in my current situation, my future is absolute and determined, I don't need to worry about anything outside the horizon. 

The current subjective time is 20 minutes past entering the horizon. I now record this recording to share devastating news. I realized I was foolish, extremely gullible and paranoid all along. A Schwarzschild black hole, as I’ve said, is eternal, not rotating and not charged. Any shifts in the total mass of the black hole would shift the laws of physics within the horizon, since within the horizon the properties of time have changed and are closely knitted with gravity itself, and therefore shift fate in the black hole, shifting the determined fate falling into the singularity. The ultimate fate will still be the singularity, but property changes of the Great Void would affect the time required, and may even distort the spacetime continuum. The problem does not end here: my entrance encouraged more energy and mass to enter the horizon or hover around the horizon. The 3 minute message showed me that humanity has started to, due to my inspiration and influence, send probes into the horizon, construct space stations around the Great Void, and ultimately built, in a far future but within my three minutes, they built a gigantic ring-shaped space station on the Great Void’s orbit. I wanted to scream at them for their folly, but realized it was my own folly that inspired their folly. Their constructions would ultimately affect the originally perfect gravitational field around the Great Void, and - at 7 minutes after entrance, I received a message that confirmed my worry - the Great Void has become imperfect. Now a Kerr-Newman rotating and charged black hole, it has also started voraciously devouring the stardust around it. The mild Great Void has, by our hands, by my hand, became the nemesis star of Ghroth. I jumped into the black sea and raised the first ripples in it, and the dark waters will never be the same ever onwards.

As for me? The constant influx of mass and the rotation of the black hole would mean the inside environment would now be extremely unstable for me. My fate would always shift, time-space would now be eternally unstable. The ultimate, known future of mine is no more. Omniscience has fallen to chaos and madness, now a great swirl of random unpredictability. I wanted the book of everything, the law of the universe, the answer to life. For just a few minutes I had it, and now I lost it. The singular law fell apart into ever shifting ethereal moments. I might be tossed and thrown everywhere until eternity now, and suffer intolerable fate before reaching the singularity. Every moment before that unknown moment would be torture for me. This recording may at some time be deciphered by the descendants of humanity or some other civilization by Hawking radiation, and whoever finds this recording, know this deed of mine the Schwarzschild Folly, the arrogant and foolish act that initiated the destruction of once existed but now eradicated perfection.