Chapter 4: Professor Jopp’s Remarkable Feats : Four

Much Ado About Nothingness

Just when some of his critics claimed that he had, as it were, not a shot left in his locker, Professor Ovis Jopp has done it again. The lean, seven-foot-two, green-bearded ‘Sage of Trondheim’, addressing an assembly of distinguished European academics in Bergen, revealed today that he has succeeded in constructing a black hole. Astounded listeners heard his explanation.

The ever-genial Jopp was in an expansive mood. “Once one grasps the principle, the rest is plain sailing,” he said. “Rather like making an atom bomb. Classical theory suggests that a body the size of the Sun will eventually collapse to become a white dwarf. A somewhat larger stellar object will change into a neutron star, while an even bigger body will transform into a black hole. My genius lay in understanding that the operation can be downsized. One needs only a core, a distributor, a coating and an imploder. As a core, I used an old cannon ball. My distributor was a thick layer of polystyrene, moulded around the core. The coating was a spheroidal green canvas bag painted with tar and perforated in places to hold the implosive element, which was a sophisticated array of normal fireworks – good old-fashioned bangers.”