Beyond the Boundary of Reason

Historians finally acknowledge that Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell pointed out the initial evidence for black holes. It has therefore been forgotten what transpired for her former professor and nobel prize obstructer, Antony Bluish. Bluish had intentionally omitted Burnell's key involvement in their research on pulsars, taking full credit instead for himself.

Once considered a genius, Bluish's work stagnated into Christian apologetics shortly after the reveal of the scandal, leading to a swift retirement from the academy and the creation of a cult.

I had taken an interest in Bluish's scientific publications from an early age, amazing at the developments in his research. Although he was proved a thief and a misogynist, I must admit it was his publications, along with the incredible work of his team (almost entirely Burnell's work) that I included Cavendish Laboratory in my graduate applications.

It wasn't until I became a fellow at Cavendish that I discovered the many treasures archived in their basement. Among the mildew scented filing cabinets and their many layers of dust, there were copious notes by Burnell. Shelves of boxes full of them. Any space remaining in that catacomb, Bluish had ventured to fill. Judging by the labels and dates on his boxes, I was stunned to find Bluish's work so focused upon singularities prior to his conversion.

Only later, did staff members begin to relate to me bizarre anecdotes of Bluish's obsession. The gathered lore in their gossip amounted to a mind overtaken with an idea: festering in masochistic delusions. More than one of his former colleagues, despite their own atheism, admitted to me that it was religion that delivered Bluish from a different fate entirely. That somehow the Romantic Judeo-Christian myths had extinguished a conflagration within the man.

I commenced my study of his unpublished bibliography the day I discovered it, box by box. Over the ensuing months I gained a picture of Bluish no biographer could dream. I found clues of what his colleagues avoided in their tales of Bluish. He hadn't obsessed generally upon singularities. His driving question was always to the nature of reality beyond the event horizon. He longed to peel back that glacier of singular space/time to see the set behind.

Initially Bluish could only speculate in the margins of other notes how such a thing might be accomplished. It took him nearly a decade to work out a hypothesis. When he did, he partnered with several heads of engineering to develop what his last note called a "singularscope": his name for a telescopic-like device, capable of projecting upon an elaborate radar display the interpreted feedback of an photon beam of expanding density.

His team's development of a such a light beam should have awarded someone a nobel prize, let alone the equations behind catching the beam's feedback pulses. They completed the project on December 24th, 1993.

On December 25th, the entire team resigned the project. Most of them seemed to have fled the country or committed suicide within the following year. Bluish was found at the Parish of St. Clement that very Christmas morning, naked and shrieking. According to Bluish's own testimony, he awoke there, "from my atheism, beneath the cross. Jesus had lanced a demon from my flesh."

I can't overstate my lack of surprise at Bluish's prompt retirement. Perhaps I was unrecovered from my shock at the destruction of every singularscope design and prototype. All that remained in those particular boxes were sheets of initial equations and hypotheses for condensing photons.

The only reason I can testify to the true nature of Bluish's device is because I couldn't cease my own investigation into it. What device did they create to condense light? Were they successful? Why did the entire project collapse as it had? My head spun with questions but all my hands could find in the sequential boxes were irrational mathematical scrawlings and Christian fiction.