Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan both knew a lot about science.  Sagan said, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology,” while Einstein claimed that “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”  It’s clear as our level of understanding grows that science is forever a work in progress.  Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity correctly predicted black holes in space, but I didn’t learn how they cause spaghettification until my daughter, an official Solar System Ambassador for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, (and in her spare time, the director of Breadline) enlightened me at Thanksgiving dinner.  “What Happens When You Get Too Close to a Black Hole?,” a NASA article by Chelsea Gohd, explains that “black holes are objects with gravity so powerful, nothing can escape their grasp. These objects can tear apart whole stars and planets.” They’re incredibly dense and their gravity is unimaginably enormous.  Its effects “can vary dramatically as black holes range from miniature to supermassive, or anywhere from tens to billions of times our Sun’s mass.”  So “what would happen if one got a little too close to a black hole?”  They’d experience unbelievable tidal forces, i.e., “the distortion of one object by another due to the difference in the gravitational pull on the near and far side of an object.”  The part closer to the black hole will feel a stronger gravitational pull than parts farther away, and “this effect essentially stretches out the object more and more as the object gets closer to the black hole, creating a long, thin shape. This process is known as spaghettification, which was first described by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in his book ‘A Brief History of Time’.”

Speaking of physics, NewYorkScienceTeacher.com’s article, “The Physics of Christmas,” states that “there are about 2 billion children in the world, but that total drops to 300 million Santa visits since he “doesn’t appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist children.”  On average 3.5 kids live in 85.7 million homes, and, assuming one good child per household, Santa has only 31 hours to makes his rounds (“assuming he travels east to west”).  He has to make 768 homes per second, or one per 1/1000^th of a second, and “if each stop is equally spaced (0.8 miles apart), he’ll cover 75.5 million miles traveling at 677 miles per second (3,385 times the speed of sound).”  Top speed for a conventional reindeer is 15 miles per hour, they can’t fly, and, assuming one one-pound toy per child. they must haul 150,000 tons.  However, on Earth “there are 300,000 organisms yet to be classified,” so “this does not rule out flying reindeer.”

Black holes and Santa’s antics boggle the imagination, and collecting manmade objects that do that is why wealthy dot.com innovator Jay Walker created the Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination which “celebrates humanity’s intellectual and emotional adventure of discovery, learning, and creativity by showcasing thousands of rare books, artworks, maps and manuscripts as well as museum-quality artifacts both modern and ancient.”  His collection includes the Harmonia Macrocosmica, a 1660 atlas that includes the first published heliocentric depiction of the Solar System, Robert Hooke’s 1666 book Micrographia that contains the earliest published depictions of insects, leaves and other objects as seen under a microscope, and a first edition Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1768.  There’s an original 1957 Russian Sputnik, a complete housecat-size skeleton of a juvenile raptor dinosaur, a working Nazi Enigma device for encrypted communication, and a 1942 White House cocktail napkin on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt briefly outlined his three-point strategy for winning World War II in his own handwriting, but Walker’s library is private and not open to the public.

You can freely explore all his wonders in books at your public library.  There are many new popular science books to consider.  Britain’s Royal Society’s 2025 book list includes “Music As Medicine” (about the amazing effects of music on neurological ailments, like dementia) by the equally amazing Daniel Levitin, and “The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad” by Sandra Knapp that describes how committed Russian botanists saved the world’s first seed bank (a type of library) during the siege of Leningrad in WWII.  Better not forget novels, according to “If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain,” a Futurism.com article that cites studies showing that “people who read a lot of fiction have better cognitive skills than people who read little or no fiction.”  Toward that end, I recommend two novels that stood out to me this past year: Percival Everett’s Pulitzer winner “James,” which tells the Huckleberry Finn story from Jim’s perspective, and Pulitzer finalist Daniel Mason’s North Woods, about a single house in the woods of New England that the Washington Post described as “a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic.” For as Jane Austen put it, “The person, be it gentleman, or Lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”