Currently we know of only one guaranteed way to create black holes. That’s through the deaths of massive stars. When they collapse in on themselves at the end of their lives, they reach high enough densities to overwhelm every other force and trigger the formation of a black hole.
But the early universe may have been exotic enough to make black holes in its own way. When inflation ended and the universe began to cool off, it was not a smooth and gentle process. Instead it was incredibly violent, with massive shifts in energy and mass from place to place. It’s possible that pockets of the universe may have spontaneously reached high enough densities to form black holes directly on their own, without having to go through the formation of stars first. These are the so-called primordial black holes.
Being almost separated from reality, the city and its entertainments, people rushing and everything that usually takes my attention I could fully concentrate on the music and soundtrack, spending most of the day with my own thoughts and having enough space to experiment and be free in a creative process. This soundtrack would probably be a very different thing if composed in a place that I am usually living in. I took this a chance to explore something new about myself as a composer and human being, taking the opposite direction that I would usually choose for myself.
No matter how “repellent” the subject matter of this book, John Gregory Bourke (1846–1896) believed it to be “none the less deserving of the profoundest consideration”. Marked as “not for general perusal”, its topic is the use of human and animal excrement in religious and medicinal rites (or, “Filth Pharmacy”), and the survival of sanitized rituals into the present day. To arrive at his conclusions, Captain Bourke consumed a bizarre mélange of anthropological learning, from “The Urine Dance of the Zuñis”, through the “Tolls of Flatulence Exacted of Prostitutes in France” (mostly collected at bridge crossings), to Christian Stercorianism, which held that the blessed sacrament is processed into ordure like ordinary food stuff.
