An interactive field guide to how physics connects — from Newton's falling apple to the glowing edge of a black hole. Every demo below shares the same handful of fundamental constants, and by the end they all collide in a single equation Stephen Hawking wrote on a blackboard in 1974.
Watch these six. Each glows when it enters a section — all six ignite at once inside the black hole.
Newton's 1687 law says the attraction between two bodies grows with their masses and collapses with the square of their distance. The constant G sets how loud the whisper is — and it is astonishingly quiet.
Einstein's 1905 result is a currency conversion: multiply any mass by the speed of light squared and you get the energy it stores. The exchange rate c² is so extreme that a paperclip holds a small city's yearly power.
The Sun runs on this ledger: fusing hydrogen shaves ~0.7% off the mass and radiates the difference. So does a black hole's accretion disk, the most efficient furnace known.
Run a current through a wire and rings of magnetic field wrap around it — curl your right hand to see which way. The strength is set by μ₀, the vacuum's magnetic stiffness.
Coulomb's force is Newton's 1/r² pull reborn for charge — except it can also push. Its strength hides ε₀, the vacuum's electric give. Between two electrons, this force beats gravity by a factor of 1042.
A battery is chemistry doing electrical work: each electron that crosses it gets lifted uphill by an energy of qV. Close the loop and a current flows — and here is the twist: the electrons themselves crawl, while the field that shoves them moves at essentially the speed of light. This one loop of wire quietly contains Stations 3, 4 and 6.
Station 4's Coulomb force holds an electron near a proton — but Planck's constant ħ forbids it from orbiting just anywhere. Only rungs on a ladder are allowed. Jump down a rung and the atom pays the energy difference as one photon of exact color.
This ladder is why neon glows red-orange and why astronomers can read a star's recipe from 100 light-years away — every element's rungs are a fingerprint.
Zoom out from one atom to 10²³ of them and a new constant takes the stage: Boltzmann's kB, the bridge between temperature and energy. Maxwell and Boltzmann showed a warm gas is a bell-curve of speeds — and chemistry happens in its fast tail.
That exponential is Arrhenius' law — the reason cooking is fast and rust is slow. Keep an eye on kB: it returns, impossibly, at the edge of a black hole.
Every trajectory in this room obeys three lines Newton wrote in 1687. Launch a projectile and watch F = ma draw a parabola — then notice that the g you chose is nothing but Station 1 in disguise.
Pack enough mass inside its Schwarzschild radius and spacetime folds shut. The boundary — the event horizon — turns out to be a thermodynamic object with a temperature (Hawking, 1974), an entropy (Bekenstein, 1972), and, astonishingly, an electrical surface resistance straight out of Maxwell's equations.
Apply Maxwell's equations at the horizon boundary (Znajek 1978; Damour; Thorne & Price's membrane paradigm, 1986) and the horizon behaves exactly like a conducting membrane with a fixed surface resistivity:
That number is the impedance of free space — the same constant hiding in Stations 3 & 4. It does not depend on the black hole's mass at all: slide M above and watch everything change except this. Electromagnetism stamps its signature on gravity's most extreme boundary — and via the Blandford–Znajek process, magnetic fields threading a spinning horizon power the brightest jets in the universe.
When two black holes merge, they broadcast a chirp in spacetime. Because general relativity predicts the waveform's loudness from first principles, each event is a standard siren — a self-calibrating distance marker that lets us re-measure cosmic constants with no ladder of assumptions.
The equation glowing in the Codex above — TH = ħc³/8πGMkB — is Hawking's. He spent his 2016 BBC Reith Lectures walking the public along the very boundary this exhibit explores.
It is said that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more true than in the case of black holes.— BBC Reith Lectures, 2016
Magnetite (Fe₃O₄) is the naturally magnetized rock that gave us the compass — and its field is still rated in gauss, after the man whose law explains why every magnet you'll ever buy has two poles. Move the compass through the stone's field and watch it argue with the entire planet.