Within the universe, there are two known singularities that cause time to slow down and come to a grinding halt: black holes, and presidential elections.

I've been thinking a lot about black holes, ever since Stephen Hawking lost his famous bet. You see, Hawking had always claimed that it's not possible to recover information once it's been sucked into a black hole. But in July of this year, he changed his mind. Black holes do release some kinds of information, he said. And because he changed his mind on this, he owes John Preskill from Caltech a big, fat set of encyclopedias.

As I reflected on the nature of black holes, it occurred to me that there are more than passing similarities between these garbage disposals of nature and presidential elections.

First of all, elections, like black holes, can be detected by an absence of something.

According to Cambridge University, a black hole is a "region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, even light." The Hubble telescope has shown us dark regions of space that are haloed with rings of dust. When gravitational measurements are calculated, the areas are found to have gravity that is a million times stronger than that of our sun. That means the objects are almost certainly black holes. Even though we can’t see them, the evidence of them is everywhere.

A presidential election also can be detected by the absence of something: namely, intelligent discourse. What you have instead is a whirling eddy of negativity, obliterating the airwaves with darkness and duplicity. You have a swarm of attack ads that only succeed in canceling each other out. A little information may leak out, but not much.

Then there is the issue of time distortion.

Time appears to pass more slowly when the local gravitational field is stronger. So if you were to observe a presidential candidate being sucked into a black hole—and you were at a constant distance from the black hole—the presidential candidate would appear to fall forever, never quite making it to the event horizon. This is what election year is like. Time telescopes, and November is always several months away.

Of course, the third and most obvious similarity between elections and black holes is that when you get close to them, they both really start to suck. I just hope that something good and enlightening will emerge from this current political black hole. Then again, we’ll probably have to settle for a nice set of encyclopedias.