Black holes
Misleading to show the black hole as a funnel or as a rubber sheet You’ve probably seen the above picture of a black hole depicted as a kind of funnel, or alternatively as a rubber sheet depressed by a heavy round mass. Far away from the funnel, or the depression in the rubber sheet, the surface is supposed to be flat and its variants have appeared in countless magazines, newspapers, popular books, and even on the cover of a textbook. In many science museums, visitors are invited to toss a small ball onto the surface of an actual funnel shaped construction. If you toss the ball with sufficient speed in an angular direction, it will orbit around the central funnel, slowly spiraling into the dark “bottomless” pit in the center. And of course, if you toss the ball in the radial direction, it will fall right in, “sucked in by the irresistible force” of the black hole, often thought of as a “source of evil” in the visitor’s mind. You know of course that this display depicts the sun equa