Skua

Apparently January 1963 managed it, and by a fair margin too. The same weather system that caused the “Big Freeze” in the UK caught large chunks of the rest of Europe too, including taking Ptolemaida in Greece down to -28 C / -18 F

Fig 6. Under the influence of various different psychoactive substances, four adult male Homo sapiens demonstrate a wide range of responses to being presented with a few strands of brightly-coloured string. Depicted, from left to right, are the subjects under the influence of ethanol, lysergic acid diethylamide, Brugmansia suaveolens, and cannabis.

Non-classical mechanics includes things like quantum physics and (depending on who you ask) special relativity. They feel extremely counterintuitive but they provide pretty reliable explanations for how things work. That infinite density doesn’t make sense in our regular understanding of the world doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a useful model. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true, of course, but the fact that it seems weird isn’t really important. It might just be that physics inside a black hole permit for something that we can best describe as infinitely dense

The comment above was about the singularity, so “the rest” clearly does not include the singularity

I don’t think “no interpretable meaning in physics” is a reasonable description, though. In classical mechanics, sure, but we’ve got plenty of physics that doesn’t work in classical mechanics

In one, you mean? They get you perfectly fine answers around one

I suppose cosmic horror elder gods like Cthulhu and such are not all that far removed from the idea of a black hole. Particularly the ones that are less involved with Earth than Cthulhu is. Nobody is ramming a black hole with a fishing boat. But the early writing on them was done at about the same time as a lot of the foundational theoretical work on black holes (not the earliest stuff but I can believe that the writers didn’t know about it)

To be fair I think “light can’t escape” thing really just is that wild, it’s pretty captivating. The idea of it being the death of a star, one of the most important things to all life we know about, only adds to that sense. Stars are massive billion-year explosions, yes, but they also bring warmth and light and beauty. Black holes are the death of all of that, even if it’s not technically more dangerous from the same distance

Well, what exactly is inside the event horizon is unproven because we cannot possibly look. All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though, and we know that there are things out there that behave just like our models of black holes predict. It’s an incomplete understanding rather than a necessarily incorrect one. If it is something else, it’d have to be something that looks more or less exactly like a black hole to an outside observer