The Hole Truth

Close encounters with the scientist who taught the world about black holes

- Lee Smolin

IT WAS DECEMBER 1972, I was seventeen years old, and I was attending my first physics conference. In spite of being the Sixth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, it was held in midtown Manhattan. I was spending the holidays in my cousin’s tiny apartment, sleeping under the grand piano that took up most of it. My teacher at Hampshire College had suggested I drop into the conference, listen to the talks, and take the opportunity to meet people. “Don’t be shy,” he said. “If you need an icebreaker, just ask them what they are working on.”

Having practised my line on the subway, I strode into the grand hotel. The first person I met was a young Texan named Lane P. Hughston, who took me to lunch and taught me twistor theory — a radically original description of the geometry of space and time as it would be experienced by a ray of light. I’d been reading Albert Einstein’s original papers on general relativity, but I’d never seen a theory so elegant. In the following days, I met and listened to lectures by many of the leading physicists of the time — including Roger Penrose, the inventor of twistor theory, himself.