Mini Black Hole of False Entertainment Forms at Famous NASCAR Race
By Greg Boose
DAYTONA (FL) – Halfway through lap 186 at this year’s Daytona 500 race, Darrel Hurker’s ball cap left his head like it had been hooked by an overzealous fisherman. Hurker, sitting in the second-to-last row in the grandstands, stopped applying suntan lotion to his white upper arms, and immediately reached for his head. Too late; his hat was headed for the huge black mass that had appeared directly over the track.
“Then my binoculars and sunglasses were like ripped right from my face, and I kind of got a better look at the whole thing,” Hurker said. “It was huge, and looked just like my bathtub water; it was completely black and had a whole bunch of crap swirling around in there.
“I held onto my beer with both hands and started praying to God right then and there. ‘Please God,’ I said, ‘Please let them finish the race.’”
Hurker, a 56-year-old land surveyor, along with his brother and over 200,000 spectators at Daytona International Speedway, found themselves encircling a quantum mechanical black hole, or a mini black hole. These astronomical masses were earlier thought to be merely hypothetical, but the dark and strong phenomena with a 2.5 mile radius had formed directly over the superspeedway’s track during its annual NASCAR race.
“I have a couple of theories as to why this event horizon formed in Daytona Beach that day,” said Dr. Adrian Douglas, a Professor of Cosmology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “First, the speeds of the cars reach almost 200 mph in a relatively condensed circle, or oval. That’s a lot of concentrated energy moving in a set pattern for what, 500 miles? It has a certain gravitational pull that just grows and grows.
“Second, there is a chance that all of that concentrated energy is not merely from these cars going around in a circle for a mind-numbing amount of time, but also from the denseness of the people watching in the stands,” Dr. Douglass explained, now referring to a flip chart on his left. He drew a picture of a black circle above a lot of frowny faces. “The hundreds of thousands of people who pay to watch these cars go round and round and round and round and round and round, as well as perhaps those at home watching on TV, have a very low standard for entertainment. It’s as if their brains are stuck in first gear, so to speak, and their combined and radiated denseness may have been trapped in the bowl-like stadium where these particles had the opportunity to collide with the mass amount of CO2 emissions from the race cars.”
Dr. Douglas traveled to Florida to study the area where the mini black hole appeared for 34 seconds before “dying.” Putting the cap back on his marker, he said his biggest worry now is that he’ll actually have to attend a NASCAR race himself in the near future.
“That’s when I’ll have to weigh scientific discovery against a stadium of underdeveloped hobos and a possible appearance by Dick Cheney,” Dr. Douglas said. “I’m hesitant.”