Bobby Prince died June 16, at 81. Real name Robert Caskin Prince III – Vietnam vet, lawyer, and for one glorious accidental decade, the guy who invented what a PC game was supposed to sound like.
I didn’t grow up with him exactly – I grew up with Duke Nukem 3D’s strip-club synth-rock, Doom’s MIDI metal grinding through a Sound Blaster, and Duke Nukem 2’s weirdly chill loops nobody else seems to remember. That music didn’t just soundtrack my teenage years. It’s still in rotation on my machine right now, three decades later.
Library of Congress inducted the Doom score into the National Recording Registry in May. A month later, he was gone. Rest easy, Bobby – the frequencies you split so the effects could cut through the music still cut through.
Loop quantum gravity has this idea called a planck star, and it’s the most elegant fix to the black hole singularity problem I’ve come across:
Classical GR says a collapsing star can crunch down to a singularity – infinite density at a point, physics’ polite way of saying “the math broke”. Planck stars say nah. Once density hits planckian (5.1 × 10⁹⁶ kg/m³, comically extreme), quantum gravity kicks in, the inward pull gets balanced by a repulsive force, and the collapse halts. You get a stable-ish ball at planck density. Not point-sized either – density triggers it, not size. Could be macroscopic.
And it’s not stable forever. It’s mid-bounce. Microseconds in proper time, billions of years from outside thanks to time dilation. What we call a black hole is just a very slow ball hitting the floor. PBS Space Time breaks it down nicely.
