Listen With Others

If you don’t recall having solved a puzzle by Verbascum, that’s not surprising. His last was over 5 years ago in January 2013 with its Carolus Linnaeus/Isaac Newton/Binomial theme. This week, we had a boundary and some clashes with a message providing a hint.

As it turned out, this was a fairly gentle and straightforward solve with Schwarzschild radius coming out of the extra letters. I vaguely remember having heard of it, although I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. Googling prompted me with a black hole reference, and from there it didn’t take long to see EVENT HORIZON around the centre of the grid.

All that was left was to resolve the clashes which revealed what came out of it. The first thing I noticed was a possible TION to the north-west of the “horizon”. Working my way back I was able to deduce RADIATION and then HAWKING, and I definitely hadn’t heard of Hawking Radiation. Slightly back-to-front logic, but I got there without further googling.

Thanks for an enjoyable solve, Verbascum. Will I have to wait another five years for your next?