After a horrible, but in hindsight, rather
obvious miscalculation, you have just been
teleported some million miles away from your
intended position, placing you in the middle
of interstellar space right in the vicinity
of a black hole.
You float helplessly.
Because you were just supposed to end up at
a particular space hub, and the trip should
have otherwise been routine, you mostly lack
anything of use for the situation other than
your enclosed spacesuit, a substantial amount
of oxygen, and a high-capacity computer and
contact device.
You have been trying to coordinate with your
contact source in order to provide them with
your position with the idea that the same
miscalculation could be made again, but this
time, intentionally and with a rescue module.
While you have been doing this, the blackhole
approaches you at an increasing rate, and
you have had no way of sufficiently turning
yourself around and moving in any other direction.
After some more time passes, a rescue module
and crew member have been assembled, and are
in the process of being sent to your location.
You feel a moment of slight relief and hope
as you are notified of this, which is quickly
brought further and further back down as the
black sphere of the outer region of the black
hole, known as the event horizon, grows at
a rate of change that you can’t barely even
comprehend.
As you approach, the universe and nearby stars
begin to diffract in strange ways, streaking
and twisting as the gravity of the blackhole
bends spacetime more and more causing light
to orbit around it and you. Your perception
becomes increasingly warped, almost like the
universe is a fresh tube of toothpaste and
you are being squeezed out of it.
Soon, the entire visible universe around the
blackhole is pushed further and further out
of your field of view, which is by now, mostly
filled with the deathly black of the indescribable
void in front of you.
Eventually, the rescue module is sent to your
location, but in order to ensure the rescue
member’s safety and avoid the risk of already
being too close to the black hole, it is sent
a good distance back, away from your initial
coordinates. Once it arrives, it approaches
you from a distance that now, even from where
you were originally sent, is a great length
away. The rescue member and contact dispatch
members observe you through the module’s
onboard telescopic visual recording device,
which is zoomed in on you at about 100X plus
magnification. The module is still much too
far away for you to see it.
At this point, as the gravitational force
of the black hole continues to contort spacetime
more and more, the functions of space and
time are beginning to swap where now the direction
of space becomes singular and time becomes
almost multidirectional. Relative to the rescue
member and everyone else, time has begun to
slow down immensely for you. From their perspective,
you are moving incredibly slow, nearly motionless
and suspended in space.
You, dispatch, and the rescuer frantically
contact back and forth, trying to determine
the limits of the situation in real time,
while real time no longer has much of any
meaning. It is by this point that it is basically
known by everyone but you, that you had mostly
already been too close or nearly past the
event horizon of the black hole by the time
the module arrived, and it is too late for
a rescue mission to be safely completed with
any real probability.
By now, you are mostly aware of this as well.
You turn your head away from the growing blackness
in front of you and look back towards the
direction you came, looking for any sight
of the rescue module in an impulse of remaining
hope and desire to see anyone before you never
see anyone ever again. The observable universe
behind you appears to be speeding up in time
through that of a fisheye lens as the warping,
black void begins to overtake it more and
more. From your perspective, the space module
flashes in and out existence before it can
even be noticed. The universe speeds up and
you see the future rapidly unfold. As you
watch, the nothingness that has filled in
front of you, begins to fill more and more
behind you, and the black hole becomes less
of a hole than that of the rest of the entire
visible universe. It looks almost as if you
are exiting out of a shrinking, rubber dome
as the universe drifts into the distance,
narrowing tighter and tighter into an increasingly
tiny orb-like glowing exit door.
You have now completely left the known universe.
The physics of space and time, as you understand
them, have lost all relevance and operation.
From here, there is only one way in all directions
no matter what you do and where you go. Everything
around you, approaching you, is the singularity
of the blackhole; the strange, mysterious,
center that could be the end or edge or breach
of all spacetime.
The rescue member, who has since been instructed
to abandon any further approach, observes
you as you appear to become completely frozen
in space on the outer edge of the black hole.
The gravitational force of the black hole
had created a dissonance of time and space
so extreme between you and the rest of the
universe, that you appear to be completely
frozen in it from the perspective of the module.
To everyone else, you haven’t even disappeared
yet, even though you are already somewhere
inside.
The rescue module has no choice but to leave
you there in what will sort of remain like
an infinitely suspended death site.
From your perspective, though, everything
has continued, and you float inside the black
hole for some amount of time.
At some point, you begin to spaghettify or
stretch as the increasingly extreme difference
of gravity’s effects on your lower body,
nearest the singularity, pull more than it
does on your upper body. Eventually you are
disintegrated further and further down, all
the way down to your most minimal, elementary
particles.
You are, in this moment, entirely theoretical.
Of course, no one has and perhaps no one ever
will be in such a situation; at least not
without it being some sort of science-fiction
or distant-future scenario. Thus, we don’t
really know what happens on the way in or
on the inside of a black hole. One; because
we can’t physically access them, and two;
because based on what we do know, even if
we could, nothing could ever enter, survive,
and come back out to confirm.
Despite this, though, we do have potentially
fairly accurate mathematic, theoretical, and
computer-based models that help us understand
that if you were in such a scenario, it would
maybe go something like that. Although, at
least to some extent, the class and type of
the black hole could change many of the related
effects and occurrences of the experience.
Ultimately, we can model and predict these
sorts of things, but at a certain point, we
obviously can’t know for sure. We can and
do, however, have a decent sense of how black
holes come to form and work on the surface
level, which is perhaps equally strange and
mysterious.
Basically, black holes form when a disproportionately
large amount of matter is concentrated down
into a disproportionately small amount of
space. Theoretically, anything with mass could
be turned into a black hole for at least a
brief period of time so long as the object’s
mass was proportionally condensed down enough.
Which is to say, theoretically, if compressed
in such a way, you yourself could be turned
into a black hole. However, as far as we understand,
the only way blackholes can properly form
and sustain themselves is when a star of large
enough mass, much greater than our own sun,
dies and collapses down under the force of
its own immense gravity. The result of which
yields the most powerful, strange, and mysterious
thing in the known universe; a point that
is known as the singularity; which is the
point that sits at the center of a blackhole
and causes all the strange phenomena that
occurs around it. This point is infinitely
small, infinitely dense, and causes gravity
to become infinitely great, which then results
in an infinite curvature of space-time. The
resulting gravitational force becomes so immense
that nothing can escape it after crossing
a certain outer threshold layer of the black
hole known as the event horizon. After crossing
this point, no object or thing in the entire
universe can escape; not even light. However,
this is not necessarily even the most perplexing
part about black holes. Rather, perhaps the
most mysterious and perplexing part is what
happens from here; the question of where you,
or what was you, ends up going and what it
might mean for our understanding of physics
and the nature of everything.
Sometime after you would have past the event
horizon and entered the black hole, not only
would you break all the way down to your most
fundamental particles, but you and everything
unique about you; the particular quantum information
you carry; appears to potentially disappear
completely. The information being referred
to here is not necessarily the sort of information
we might typically think of, but rather, quantum
information that describes the properties
of atoms and the path of their various formal
arrangements, which theoretically, if you
hadn’t been sucked into a black hole, would
always continue to exist, even after you’re
gone. And even more theoretically, if the
information could be collected and measured,
it would still, long into the future, house
and sustain unique information about your
physical state. This would be true for everything
across the entire history of the universe.
In the case of falling into the black hole,
though, your information is not only swallowed
up, but also potentially erased. We know this
to be possible because of a discovery made
by Stephen Hawking around 1974, which showed
that black holes emit radiation, now known
as Hawking Radiation, and slowly but surely,
over a very, very inconceivably long time,
radiate their entire mass away until they
eventually, in a remote future, die and dissolve
away completely. This would then potentially
only leave their evaporated radiation behind.
The problem here is that their radiation seems
to contain no unique information, but rather,
appears to be a spewing of informational nothingness,
all of it being the same as the rest, indistinguishable
and impossible to decipher anything from.
This is rather terrifying just at face value
but becomes even more terrifying in terms
of what it means for physics and our understanding
of the universe. The issue here being; a key
principle of physics is that no information
in the universe can ever be destroyed. And
if it is destroyed, much of what defines physics
could be wrong. This issue is known as the
black hole information paradox.
There are a number of ideas that attempt to
resolve this paradox; some which disregard
or refute the premise of Hawking’s theory;
some of which suggest the information collects
somewhere we can’t quite find or access
either in or on the surface of the black hole
and still remains somewhere during and after
a black hole’s lifetime; others of which
suggest that black holes create wormholes
where information is sent from this universe
to another universe or a different position
in spacetime; all of which, these and others
unmentioned, currently remain highly theoretical,
unprovable, and unresolvable.
Ultimately, the paradox of black holes and
the very nature of black holes, is one of,
if not the primary territories of space that
remains not only unknown, but essential to
our understanding of basically everything
else. Even despite the potential loss of quantum
information, the very essence of our current,
general understanding of black holes defies
physics and has serious conflicting implications.
Everything we understand about the universe
is currently built on two pillars; Albert
Einstein’s theory of general relativity
and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s theory
of general relativity deals with the large,
macro level of the universe, and quantum mechanics
deals with the micro level. Currently, these
two pillars work very well on their own, but
don’t often work very well together, and
their unification is generally accepted as
one of science and physics’ great contemporary
issues. The accomplishment of which in the
form of some unifying equation would be deemed,
potentially, the theory of everything. Both
of these pillars, however, appear to find
themselves in a rather strange situation inside
black holes, where neither seem to work.
Based on Albert Einstein’s theory of general
relativity, blackholes create a singularity,
and that’s how we are able to form the conclusion
of it being there. However, according to physics,
that’s impossible. You can’t have an infinite
density or infinite gravitational force or
infinite anything in physics. Infinity, to
our knowledge, cannot be real in a physical,
measurable sense, and when it appears in equations,
it’s essentially a sign of an error or impossibility.
And thus, Einstein’s theory breaks down.
At the minute scale of the singularity, typically
quantum field theory would step in. But quantum
field theory can’t work here either because
it can’t yet explain gravity, and the functions
of blackholes and the singularity are primarily
based on gravity. And so, it seems that somewhere
between the edge and core of black holes is
either the separate collapse of both theories,
destroying much of our understanding of everything,
or the unification of both theories, creating
a supposed ultimate theory of everything.
In this sense, the primary answer needed for
the complete understanding of the universe
happens to potentially be contained and hidden
in a place that nothing can seem to ever enter
and come out of. A potential final frontier
of human knowledge guarded by a mammoth sized,
galactic beast.
Perhaps this beast is undefeatable. Or perhaps
we simply lack the mathematic weaponry to
properly fight it. For many of the greatest
and most confusing paradoxes in history, even
greater minds and greater efforts have come
along, confronted, and beat them, dissolving
such paradoxes away into the falsidical realm
forever. And perhaps here, inside black holes,
we will do the same again. Either that, or
perhaps we will be dissolved by the paradox
first.
You are, in this moment, elementary particles
traveling closer and closer to the singularity
of the black hole you entered some irrelevant
time ago. The quantum informational remanence
of you remains as it circulates in a way that
could only be described beyond material perception.
Eventually, it locates inside, on the outside,
or somewhere beyond the blackhole. Your material
collects together or spews and scatters everywhere.
It makes no difference. You exist here; at
this particular point; at the answer. Your
particles reveal what hundreds of thousands
of years of civilization has labored to discover.
An embodiment of space, time, matter, energy,
and features of reality unknown; an unveiling
of the limits of the infinite and the unending,
succeeding conformal boundaries of the finite;
an explanation
of everything. And
you are particles.
