Gary Monro’s blog

Crikey. Even the title scares the life out of me.

It gets worse once the programme actually starts. One of the strengths of good science programmes - like Horizon - is that they manage to turn science into stories. Sometimes it’s a detective story, sometimes a scary story but always a story. And a story that keeps you glued to the very end. Forget tripe like EastEnders - give me something like this:

So these super-massive black holes (SMBHs from now on or my fingers will drop off) - not super, not massive but super and massive - are really very, very big indeed. In fact, they are between 1 million and 1 billion times bigger than the standard black hole.

And the standard black hole is a frightening enough thing. Caused by the ongoing contraction of its own matter the black hole - previously a star, now dead - becomes smaller and smaller and increasingly dense. Its gravitational pull becomes super-strong, pulling in gas from nearby stars, literally stripping them of all substance. Such is the intense pull of a black hole’s gravity that light itself cannot escape - hence its blackness. The more the black hole consumes the more massive - and therefore the more strong - it becomes. For me, black holes are the ultimate nightmare scenario. In my fevered imagination, one could drift by earth and simply relieve it of its atmosphere. That would be the end of us all.

You can’t see a black hole because it’s black. And it’s a hole. But you know they’re where they are by the effects they have on surrounding matter - other stars particularly. What scientists first discovered was a really big one - a SMBH - in the middle of a galaxy and it was quite a find in the world of cosmology. So they decided to look for some more.

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Just heard on the BBC this morning that police are set to patrol Hampstead Royal Free Hospital because of the criminal behaviour there. This is saddening but it’s becoming all the more common now that, in a society that is soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime, our health staff not only have to suffer the stresses of long hours, hard physical work and mental strain but also aggressive language and violent behaviour.

But what really amazed me was the BBC’s assertion that crime in the Royal Free Hospital accounts for one quarter of all Hampstead’s crime.

Even if that’s more a testament to the relative good behaviour of Hampstead’s residents it is quite shocking that so much of the borough’s criminality is concentrated in one hospital. I still fall into the trap of thinking of hospitals as havens, as places of care and safety. I bet there are plenty of health professionals who can put me straight about that….