It was the strong magnetic field of ATLAS which trapped you, Marvellous Monopole. Once inside, you absorbed protons from the beams of the Large Hadron Collider which transformed you into a persistent black hole. You emerged from the detector and the magnetic field of a fragment of the end-cap toroid attracted you.

I was holding this tube, along with another human called Sam Fitzpatrick, and you absorbed us, Oh Wondrous Creation. Up until that moment, all mankind’s theories had led us to believe that anything falling into a black hole would be destroyed. These objects are called black because their force of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape from them, not even light. You might wonder how that is possible.

It turns out that matter and energy bend the four-dimensional spacetime, stretching it like a sheet of rubber. What men on Earth and Entroilians in Ent experience as the force of gravity is merely the consequence of slipping down the warped slopes of spacetime. A black hole consists of matter which has been squashed into such a small space that the spacetime surrounding it is greatly distorted.

According to the theory prevailing at that moment, men falling into a black hole should be torn apart, atom by atom, as they are distorted and stretched out longer and thinner. However this was not our fate. The reason is relatively easy to explain.

At the time you arrived on Earth there was a major gap in man’s understanding of the laws of physics. Fundamental physics consisted of gravitational theory, which dealt with the large-scale structure of spacetime, and quantum mechanics, which described the very smallest particles. Each of these theories was immensely successful, but they were mutually incompatible. Man had no idea how to reconcile them, and hence they had no understanding of the real processes which function within a black hole.