When a physicist runs the numbers on a black hole passing through a human body, the result is not a cinematic vaporization but a precise, almost clinical portrait of how gravity would pull a person apart. The calculation turns a cosmic horror into a spreadsheet problem, translating tidal forces and spacetime curvature into stresses on flesh, bone, and brain. In that translation, the body becomes data, and the person at the center of the thought experiment risks disappearing into the math.
I want to stay with that discomfort, not to sensationalize it, but to ask what it means when we treat a human being as a test mass in an equation. The physics is real and unforgiving, yet the way we frame it, visualize it, and communicate it shapes whether the person remains visible inside the story. The black hole is a metaphor for that tension as much as it is an object in the sky.
When physics turns a person into a variable
The starting point is brutally simple: in general relativity, a body near a black hole is just another distribution of mass and charge moving along a geodesic. When a theorist imagines a compact object passing “through” you, they are really asking how tidal gradients scale with distance and density, and whether the forces exceed the structural limits of tissue. The person becomes a boundary condition, a set of parameters that can be swapped out for a steel rod or a spacecraft hull without changing the underlying equations. That abstraction is the power of the theory, but it is also why these scenarios can feel so alien to lived experience.
Designers and communicators face a similar reduction when they translate complex ideas into visual form. In conference proceedings on communication design, contributors describe how intricate systems are routinely simplified into schematic diagrams and infographics so they can be reasoned about and shared, a process that inevitably strips away context and nuance in favor of clarity, as seen in the collected work on visual communication in the UCDA design proceedings. The physicist’s move from person to parameter is a cousin of that design move from world to diagram: both are acts of compression that risk erasing the very thing that made the subject matter human in the first place.
The strange intimacy of a cosmic thought experiment
There is something unsettlingly intimate about imagining a black hole interacting with a single body instead of a distant galaxy. The scenario forces a collision between scales that rarely meet, putting Planck units and heartbeats in the same sentence. In that collision, the human figure becomes a kind of narrative bridge, a way to make an otherwise abstract calculation legible to non-specialists. The person is not in the equations, but they are in the story wrapped around them, and that story is where meaning is negotiated.
Writers and editors who work at the intersection of science and culture have long used personal-scale narratives to make vast systems feel tangible, whether they are unpacking climate models, neural networks, or cosmology. In one university journal of undergraduate research and creative writing, contributors move between technical explanation and first-person reflection to keep the human stakes visible inside complex topics, a strategy that shows up repeatedly in the essays collected in the Fall 2017 research journal. When I picture a black hole “through” a person, I see the same narrative move: the body is a lens that lets readers feel the scale of the physics, even as the math itself remains indifferent to who is doing the falling.
How numbers flatten terror into technique
Once the scenario is set, the calculation proceeds with a kind of moral neutrality. You estimate the black hole’s mass, its radius, the relative velocity, and then compute the tidal acceleration across the length of a human body. The result is a set of stresses and timescales that can be compared to known material limits. The horror of spaghettification is translated into kilonewtons per square meter and microseconds to structural failure. In that translation, fear becomes a unit, and the event becomes something that can be tabulated, graphed, and filed.
That flattening is not unique to physics. In machine learning benchmarks, for example, wildly different prompts and scenarios are reduced to scores in a JSON file so models can be compared on a single scale. A commit log from an evaluation suite shows how entire conversations and tasks are compressed into numeric ratings for systems like “Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B-DPO,” with each run stored as a line in a structured file, as documented in the WildBench evaluation record. The move from messy reality to clean metric is what makes comparison possible, but it also hides the texture of what is being measured. A black hole calculation does the same thing to terror: it turns it into a number that can be slotted into a table.
Embodiment, diagrams, and the missing body
To understand what gets lost when a person becomes a variable, it helps to look at how embodiment is treated in other analytical fields. In cognitive science and philosophy of mind, the body is not just a container for the brain but an active participant in perception and thought. When a scenario imagines a cosmic object passing through a body, it is implicitly treating that body as passive matter, ignoring the ways in which lived experience, sensation, and selfhood are bound up with physical form. The diagram of forces has no room for pain, fear, or awareness.
Scholars who study the history of scientific diagrams have traced how visual conventions can either foreground or erase embodiment. In one extensive monograph on the evolution of scientific illustration, the author shows how early anatomical drawings lingered on the individuality of bodies, while later technical schematics abstracted them into interchangeable parts, a shift that parallels the move from person to parameter in physics scenarios, as detailed in a comprehensive study of scientific representation available through a Spanish-language digital monograph. When I picture the black hole calculation, I see it as the latest entry in that lineage of abstraction, one that privileges clean lines over messy bodies.
Spacetime as a design problem
There is another way to read the thought experiment: as a design challenge about how to communicate extreme physics without losing the person at its center. If spacetime curvature is treated as a kind of invisible architecture, then the question becomes how to render that architecture in a way that keeps human scale visible. The familiar rubber-sheet analogy, with a bowling ball on a stretched membrane, is one attempt. Imagining a black hole interacting with a single body is another, more visceral attempt to anchor curvature in something readers can feel.
Researchers in information visualization and interface design have wrestled with similar problems when they try to depict multidimensional data in forms that ordinary users can navigate. A thesis from the University of Porto, for instance, examines how interactive visual systems can make complex datasets legible without overwhelming or misleading viewers, treating the layout of information as a kind of navigable space that users move through, as explored in a detailed design and visualization dissertation. When a physicist frames a black hole scenario around a single body, they are, in effect, designing an interface to spacetime: a way to let readers “walk through” curvature using their own anatomy as the map.
Brains under impossible stress
Running the numbers on a black hole through a person is not just about bones and blood; it is also about what happens to the nervous system under impossible gradients. Even before structural failure, the brain would be subjected to differential accelerations that distort its tissue and disrupt its electrical activity. From a purely physical standpoint, neurons are just charged cells embedded in a soft medium, and the calculation can treat them as such. Yet that view leaves out the question of when, in this cascade of forces, consciousness would flicker or fail.
Neuroscientists who study how distributed brain activity gives rise to unified experience have proposed that consciousness depends on the integration of signals across distant cortical regions. One set of hypotheses describes how psychological and physiological “binding” might emerge from coordinated patterns of cortical firing, suggesting that disruptions in this integration can fragment perception and selfhood, as outlined in a detailed paper on cortical activity and binding available through open research archives. If those integration mechanisms depend on relatively gentle conditions, then the tidal distortions in a black hole encounter would not just tear tissue; they would shatter the very processes that make a person feel like a single, continuous self.
Ethics at the edge of imagination
Thought experiments are often treated as ethically neutral, especially in physics, where no one is actually being harmed. Yet the choice of scenario still matters. Imagining a black hole interacting with a person invites readers to picture a specific kind of suffering, even if the calculation itself is bloodless. The way that suffering is framed, joked about, or aestheticized can either reinforce a culture of detachment or open space for reflection about what it means to turn people into test cases. The ethics here are subtle, but they are not absent.
Legal and philosophical scholarship on emerging technologies has highlighted how hypothetical scenarios can shape real-world norms long before any policy is written. In a recent volume on law and digital transformation, contributors argue that the stories experts tell about edge cases, from autonomous vehicles to predictive policing, influence how institutions and publics come to see certain harms as acceptable trade-offs, a pattern examined in depth in a collection on technology and regulation available through a German-language legal studies volume. When physicists casually deploy human bodies in catastrophic scenarios, they are participating in that same narrative economy, helping to normalize a style of reasoning in which people are variables and extreme harm is just another line in a derivation.
Teaching the abyss without glamorizing it
For educators, the challenge is to harness the gripping power of such scenarios without turning them into spectacle. A black hole passing through a person is a memorable way to illustrate tidal forces, but it can also slide into a kind of morbid entertainment if it is not framed carefully. The key is to keep the focus on what the calculation reveals about the structure of spacetime, while still acknowledging that the imagined subject is not just a stick figure but a stand-in for real bodies and minds. That balance is hard to strike, especially in classrooms and media environments that reward shock value.
Pedagogical research on science education in colleges has emphasized the importance of contextualizing dramatic examples within broader ethical and humanistic discussions. A compilation of teaching materials from Loyola Academy, for instance, stresses that even in technical subjects, instructors should connect abstract content to questions of human dignity and social impact, encouraging students to see themselves as responsible stewards of knowledge rather than detached calculators, as outlined in a set of curriculum documents collected in a teaching resource volume. Applying that lens to black hole thought experiments means asking not only “what happens” in the math, but also “what are we doing” when we use a person’s body as a prop in our explanations.
Stories, systems, and the pull of the void
Behind all of this is a deeper question about how stories and systems interact. The equations of general relativity describe a world in which matter and energy curve spacetime, and objects follow the paths that curvature dictates. Human narratives, by contrast, are built around agency, intention, and meaning. When a physicist runs the numbers on a black hole intersecting a person, those two logics collide. The system treats the person as inert matter; the story insists on seeing them as a subject. The tension between those views is where much of the scenario’s unease comes from.
Media theorists and designers have argued that any system, whether physical or computational, is always mediated through the stories we tell about it. In a widely cited essay on data, diagrams, and narrative, one researcher describes how interfaces and visualizations do not simply present information but actively shape the kinds of questions users can ask, turning raw systems into lived experiences, as explored in a reflective text on design and communication available at Carvalhais’s design study. The black hole calculation is one such interface: a way of making the invisible curvature of spacetime visible through the imagined fate of a single body. The risk is that, in the process, the person becomes nothing more than a cursor moving along a geodesic.
Living with the math and the metaphor
In the end, the image of a black hole “through” you is both a precise physical scenario and a metaphor for how modern science often treats people. It captures the way powerful theories can turn individuals into interchangeable units, necessary for the calculation but irrelevant to its outcome. At the same time, it shows how much we rely on those same individuals, as narrative anchors, to make sense of ideas that would otherwise be too abstract to grasp. The person is erased in the equations and restored in the story, caught between two incompatible roles.
Scholars who work at the intersection of science, philosophy, and culture have urged a more integrated approach, one that treats human experience as a legitimate part of how we understand complex systems rather than an optional add-on. A doctoral dissertation from the University of Miami, for example, argues that scientific knowledge and humanistic reflection should be seen as mutually informing practices, not competing domains, tracing how conceptual frameworks from physics, literature, and ethics can be woven together in a single analytic project, as detailed in a comprehensive interdisciplinary dissertation. When I think about a physicist running the numbers on a black hole through a person, that is the integration I want: a calculation that does not flinch from the rigor of the math, and a narrative that refuses to let the person at its center be swallowed entirely by the void.
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