This pi shawl is made as a sampler using stitches designed by Dorothy Reade. I made this up as I went and chose a pattern stitch that had the number of rows I needed for each section as well as a repeat that was close to what I needed. You can copy my design exactly or choose whatever stitches you like for each section. I’ve included some notes below with each chart to explain how I adapted Dorothy Reade’s original pattern stitch for use in this shawl. I call this Event Horizon because the black border traps all of the lightness of the colors in the center of the shawl in a way that reminds me of a black hole in space. I used four colors of teal for the large shawl and three for the small shawl, changing to a darker shade after running out of yarn each time. The border in black is the actual event horizon of the black hole, trapping all of the light inside.

Note: The sizes in the pattern are S (60”) and L (72”) and take 2000 and 2400 yards of yarn. I have a variation for an XS (54”) that can be made with 1600 yards. For XS, skip to border after “Work as set until all 34 rnds of Large Diamonds motif have been completed twice. Or whenever you run out of your third color.”

Uhoh! Stephen Hawking says he made a mistake; event horizons don’t exist.

Hawking now believes physicists should be thinking in terms of “apparent horizons” — boundaries that can contain matter and light for a period of time — rather than the classical event horizon.

In his paper, Hawking writes: “This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.”

Based on the respected physicist’s latest assumptions, Peet said, the reason it’s so hard to recover information out of black holes would be because this apparent horizon behaves pretty much like a true event horizon would, except that “chaos would be driving the scrambling of information rather than some mysterious property of quantum gravity.”