Max Joseph Fahn

A tuning fork rings with a single note until a tremor of the floor reaches it. A photon in empty space is like such a tuning fork: its polarization can be strictly vertical or horizontal, and that is a pure quantum state. But the space around it is not empty. It is threaded by gravitational waves that stretch and squeeze everything in their path.

A quantum particle can be in two states at once, like a coin spinning, both heads and tails. Near a black hole, the event horizon, where spacetime curvature bends space and time to the extreme, acts as a one-way gate.