Talk 25 November 2021

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‘Don’t walk alone’
Beachgoers respond after woman attacked
TK MTIKI
TotT’s latest Facebook
question was: Following
the attack on a woman on
East Beach (last Friday), what
advice would you give to other
beachgoers and dog walkers to
avoid incidents of this nature?
TotT readers suggest that
people should walk in groups,
have pepper spray and police
must come to the party as well.
Colleen Denniss said: “What
does one do, I don’t know. One
has to have your freedom and
there is nothing better than
taking a stroll on the beach with
your dogs.”
Russell Kearney said he had
walked along East Beach with
his dog almost every morning
for almost two years, and again
just an hour before the attack.
“Last Friday, a thug also
broke into a parked vehicle at
the small car park. Looks like it’s
time to carry my stun gun as
w e l l ,” he said.
Justin Anthony Ehrke
suggested carrying pepper
s p ray.
Graça Nascimento Ward
suggested people walk wh e n
there are other people around.
“Not a great solution but we
don’t all have a bazooka at the
r e a dy,” she said.
Eloise McComb
L a b u s ch a g n e said: “Po s t p o n e
the walk if beach is deserted.
“Don’t park at the dune
parking – you can easily be
watched from above in the
bushes and they will know how
many people are on the beach
by seeing the number of cars in
parking area.”
Linda Reynolds said:
“Maybe it’s time we had a
beach patrol unit at certain
times when people walk their
dogs. Very sad indeed that this is
happening. Don’t walk alone.”
John Birch said: “Get bigger
d o g s .”
George Smith said: “If they,
the powers to be, just opened
the beaches to fishermen and
the vehicles there would be
more men along the beach and
90% less s**t.”
Lloyd Preddy said don’t walk
alone unless you have at least
some defence with you.
“Not to be rude but we live
in times where lots of people are
without jobs and will think
nothing of hurting even old
people for very little. Sad but
t r u e ,” he said.
Trish Shearar said: “This is
not an isolated case. There have
been quite a few attacks on East
Beach. Surely the police are
there to prevent crime not just
react to it. Centenary Park is
another hotspot. I find it strange
that the perpetrators are free to
carry on.”
Robin Collett said: “The fact
is we have to be alert all the
time. Not walk alone, look
behind often and if you see you
are followed join others quickly.
Have a pepper spray in your
pocket, not a gun, as a woman
can be overpowered easily and
her gun used against her.”
Charline Middleditch and
Alida Botes Taylor said the
beaches were so well protected
in hard lockdown, but not
against criminals.
Nick Louw agreed, s ay i n g
that last year he had seen fully
armed police running after an
elderly woman with her dog on
West Beach.
What are black holes?
When I was a student in the
1970s, I presented my first
professional talk at a meeting of
the American Astronomical
S o c i e t y.
It was about a type of
pulsating stars. The chair was
Professor Martin Schwarzschild
of Princeton University, one of
the great astrophysicists of the
20th century.
Schwarzschild was of
German Jewish ancestry, born
in Potsdam in 1912. He
escaped Germany in 1936 to
the USA, where he worked in
US army intelligence in World
War 2 and was awarded a
Legion of Merit. He also wrote
a textbook on the structure and
evolution of stars that I had
learnt from as an
u n d e r g ra d u a t e .
Schwarzschild spoke in a
loud, forceful way with a
German accent. After my talk
he demanded, “WHAT are
these stars’ REASONS to
P U L S AT E ? ”
I was terrified.
Since I had learnt the
answer from his textbook, I
thought, “If he doesn’t know,
then what I am thinking cannot
be right.” One of the senior
astronomers in the audience
told him the answer was
simple, and he said softly, “Oh.
I missed that.” I understood, on
meeting him in later years, that
he was just being kind in
providing a poor graduate
student with an easy question.
Schwarzschild’s father is
even better known. Karl
TALK OF THE
S TA R S
Professor Don Kurtz
Schwarzschild died in 1916 of
an auto-immune disease
contracted on the Russian Front
in the First World War, when
Martin was 4. In 1915, Karl
Schwarzschild calculated the
first exact solutions to Albert
Einstein’s equations of General
Relativity, his new theory of
gravity, also published in
1915. Karl found the radius of
a black hole where even light
cannot escape the stupendous
gravity. This is universally
known as the “S ch wa r z s ch i l d
Radius”.
What is a black hole? The
most massive stars die in the
“Iron catastrophe”. If the star is
too massive, gravity is so strong
that nothing can withstand it,
and its core collapses to
smaller than the Schwarzschild
radius where the escape
velocity is greater than the
speed of light, so nothing, not
even light, can escape.
The Sun will not, and
cannot, collapse to be a black
hole. If it could, it would have a
Schwarzschild radius of a mere
3km – it would be smaller than
Port Alfred.
You do not want to get
anywhere near a black hole.
Long before you fell in, its great
tides would strip you apart to
your atoms, then tear them
apart, too.
We detect black holes in
binary stars – two stars orbiting
each other. We can measure
the mass of the black hole by
how fast the other star orbits it.
We see some stars orbiting
something invisible, but with a
mass more than 10 times that of
the Sun. Only a black hole can
be that massive and invisible.
A galaxy has about 100
billion stars orbiting about their
common centre of gravity (our
Milky Way is a galaxy). Down
in the hearts of galaxies we see
stars moving so fast around a
tiny invisible point that we
know there is a monstrous
black hole. The one in our
Milky Way has a mass 5 million
times greater than that of our
Sun, yet it is smaller than the
solar system. In other galaxies
the central black hole can be as
big as 3 billion times the mass
of our Sun!
Those supermassive black
holes were created when one
star became a small black hole
in the centre of a galaxy where
the stars are close together. As
the black hole encountered
other stars, it ate them. A black
hole is much like “The Blob” in
the 1958 film.
Giant black holes produce
celestial fireworks on a
stupendous scale.
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