Watse Sybesma at Nordita, with his children’s book Emmy and the Black Hole That Stole Her Sock. The photo was taken in the institute’s small play area for visiting families.
What if a black hole stole your sock? That’s the playful question at the heart of Emmy and the Black Hole That Stole Her Sock, a children’s book written by Nordita assistant professor Watse Sybesma. With its imaginative story, the book invites children to get acquainted with a phenomenon many of us are fascinated with: black holes.
From PhD Hallways to Picture Books
"Children are familiar with the moon and the sun and the stars,” says Sybesma, “they should also be familiar with black holes, it should also be part of the standard canon."
The idea came about when Sybesma and illustrator Diego Cohen-Maldonado were PhD students in the Netherlands. Diego was known for sketching cartoons not only of physics problems but also of what had been happening in class or to make fun of people. The two researchers had been talking about how it would be fun to do something creative together, but the moment that Sybesma remembers the idea really taking off was when Diego won the annual Dutch physics day poster competition with a poster that was one big cartoon about his research.
“It was such a unique and inspiring poster; that is when we got really excited about doing something together. We looked into it, and there were no children’s books that we could find about black holes, so we decided to go for it. We had a lot of ideas that went in many directions, it was a fun process.”
How Do You Draw a Black Hole?
Writing for children, however, turned out to be more challenging than expected. “We started with the physics and then had to come up with a story, which was probably the wrong way around,” reflects Sybesma. They also had to rewrite Emmy’s way of speaking several times, looking into how young children actually speak and think, to make her feel more real.
The final result is a book where playful illustrations play an important role in bringing the story to life. Cohen-Maldonado’s drawings are simple but expressive. “I really like how Diego put so much attention into some of these drawings. Like the one on page 15, where the black hole appears for the first time. Drawing the black hole was a challenge since a black hole almost by definition, as far as we know, is featureless. So, he came up with these planets that are hovering around it, as the eyes. And then, the fact that Emmy’s hair is always pointing towards the black hole, showing the gravitational pull. It looks simple in a sense but there is a lot of thought behind it”. So, the illustrations help draw the reader in, and the imaginative tale and the rhymes keep the tone light, but underneath the surface the story deals with concepts that are immensely complex. As a theoretical physicist, how did Sybesma go about describing black hole physics for children without oversimplifying the science?
“That was very difficult,” admits Sybesma. “When you’re doing outreach, you are always taking some liberties; there is a tradeoff between wanting to reach out to an audience and wanting to tell the truth.” Some of these choices are obvious: Emmy floats through space unharmed, travels vast distances and her sock gets stolen in her room by the black hole… “none of which could actually happen, of course” notes Sybesma. “Even a huge black hole can’t steal your sock from across the galaxy,” Sybesma says, laughing. “But we wanted to reach the children with a story that would make them curious”.
An illustration from page 15, where Emmy first meets the black hole.
Telling Science Stories
The story may be playful, but the science behind it reflects years of serious work. Theoretical black holes have been at the core of Sybesma’s research since the very beginning “I’ve done excursions beyond black holes,” he says, “but somehow I always come back. They connect gravity and quantum mechanics in unprecedented ways, and that makes them powerful theoretical laboratories for testing ideas that might one day unify those two worlds.”
Writing a children’s book turned out to have unexpected consequences for how he communicates science more broadly. “It gave me a real appreciation for the kind of outreach journalism where you really try to get it right,” he says. “Even though I was already working on black holes, there were areas I didn’t know much about, like gravitational waves. I ended up doing a lot of reading outside my field to make sure I wasn’t getting anything wrong.”
That effort shows up in the book’s appendix, which clarifies the facts where the story gets creative. “I was, and still am, mortified that something in there could be scientifically inaccurate,” Sybesma says. “But having done that work, I now feel more comfortable explaining aspects of black hole physics outside my own niche.”
He’s currently working on a new book, this time about gravitational waves. Progress is slow, but the motivation is clear: “It’s just so mind-boggling to me that we can now detect ripples in spacetime from black holes spiraling into each other. I want more people to understand just how special that is.”
