If you want any understanding of black holes, you’re going to need to read several books about black holes. Originally from New York, she's as surprised as anyone that she lives in Bloomington, Indiana. When she's not reading or writing, she's probably knitting or scouring used book stores for vintage gothic romance paperbacks. Look for The Truth About Black Holes on the cover of the March issue of National Geographic magazine, on newsstands February 25.Isabelle Popp has written all sorts of things, ranging from astrophysics research articles and math tests to crossword puzzles and poetry. The bottom line: The mysteries surrounding black holes are far from resolved. This line of thought might serve as the foundation for research that could settle the firewall controversy, Susskind said. Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind of Stanford University in California, who also did not take part in Hawking's research, suggests there may be another solution to the conundrums that black holes pose.įor instance, work by Susskind and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study hint that a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement might link two black holes via a wormhole (a shortcut connecting points distant in space and time). "These problems are very far from being resolved." "I would caution against any belief that Hawking has come up with a dramatic new solution answering all questions regarding black holes," said theoretical physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology, who did not participate in Hawking's study. However, many researchers have expressed skepticism that Hawking's idea solves the riddles of black holes. It would look like this: Not the Last Word Instead of an event horizon, he says, black holes have "apparent horizons" that only temporarily entrap matter and energy, which are eventually released as radiation that retains all the original information about what fell into the black hole, albeit in highly scrambled form. ![]() His idea resolves the problem of black holes defying the equivalence principle by doing away with their event horizons. This principle basically says that people do not experience their weight while in free fall, so falling through a black hole's event horizon should be an unremarkable event-which is why an astronaut would not even be aware of the transit. ![]() The problem with firewalls is that while they obey quantum physics, they contradict Einstein's well-tested equivalence principle. Here's how that would look: Hawking's Idea The radiation released by the firewall would preserve information about the destroyed objects, astronauts included. In this scenario, our astronaut would be instantly incinerated when crossing the event horizon, as would anything else falling into a black hole. These are zones of extraordinarily destructive radiation. To resolve this conflict, some scientists have recently (and controversially) suggested that black holes have "firewalls" at their event horizons. But quantum physics, the best description so far of how the universe behaves on a subatomic level, includes a principle known as unitarity, which maintains that information cannot be destroyed. This original picture of black holes holds that they essentially destroy all information about anything that ventures past their event horizons-astronauts included. But the extreme gravity inside the black hole would stretch the astronaut's body thinner and thinner, a process whimsically known as "spaghettification." Here's how it would look:Įventually it would be crushed at the singularity, a point of infinite density at the black hole's center. One way to illustrate this is to pretend that a person-say an astronaut-is falling in.Įinstein's theory of general relativity holds that the astronaut would feel nothing in particular while crossing the event horizon. ![]() More on that in a minute.įirst, let's explain the conventional view of how black holes work. That means that stuff-including light-can indeed escape from black holes. Now Hawking says there are no event horizons after all. The boundary past which there is supposedly no return is known as the event horizon. The conventional view of black holes is that they possess a gravitational pull so powerful that nothing is able to escape, not even light. The challenge of nailing down the nature of black holes has returned to the news, with renowned physicist Stephen Hawking saying recently that "there are no black holes"-at least not how we've thought of them. Black holes are shrouded in mystery, with recent research only deepening scientists' understanding of how strange they must be.
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