sink into or depress the sheet to deform it. If we replace the ball with a heavier one and place it on the sheet,the ball will stretch the rubber more and the deformation will be greater, with the ball sinking deeper into the rubber. A still heavier ball will deform the sheet more and the ball will sink still farther into the rubber. Finally, if the ball had almost infinite weight and we assumed the rubber sheet could not tear, the ball would drop to an almost infinite distance from the framesupporting the rubber. And if at that instant the rubber sheet did open up a tiny hole,the ball might pop through the tiny hole to escape the sheet. With the escape of theball, the pressure on the rubber would be relaxed and it would spring back to its initial position as a flat sheet. The gravitational stress would have been removed fromspace-time, but the ball would have effectively left our universe. Where would the ballbe now? This situation has been deeply explored by many astronomers that we knowof today.(Levitt 80-81) To return to our rubber sheet analogy, we can visualize a second rubber sheetdirectly under the first; as the black hole deforms the top sheet in some mysterious manner the bottom sheet is also deformed as a mirror image of the top. Or one can picture a softly inflated rubber balloon into which one is poking a finger. We will poke a finger in from the other side along a diameter. Now imagine a marble being pushed into the balloon by one of the fingers; the finger coming in from the other side of the balloon just touches it. Further imagine that the marble mysteriously passes through the two distended layers of the rubber. When the pressure of thefingers is removed, the marble ends up at the other side of the balloon, diametricallyopposite to the point where it was introduced. If we imagine the marble to be a black hole in this fashion, we have transferred it to another part of the universe. One serious...
