Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything | Aeon Essays

"What came first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps a silly conundrum already solved by Darwinian biology. But nature has supplied us with a real version of this puzzle: black holes. Within these cosmic objects, the extreme warping of spacetime brings past and future together, making it hard to tell what came first. Black holes also blur the distinction between matter and energy, fusing them into a single entity."

"Physicists like me have long since accepted these strange properties of black holes. But I suspect that nature could very well have played a different trick altogether, and made black holes a gateway to something far more unusual - a region where the rules of spacetime themselves transform into something we've never seen before. Many objects we think of as black holes may, in fact, be imposters: identical on the outside but harbouring entirely different physics within. Finding out whether that's true will require peeling back the shell of reality itself. And humankind is getting closer to doing exactly that."

"Before Albert Einstein's theories, gravity had various unexplained features. Isaac Newton's gravity states that the planets feel the Sun through the vacuum of space with no interaction whatsoever. What's more, it also states that any interaction takes zero time. If we were to remove the Sun with the flick of a wand, Newton's gravity suggests the planets would immediately be stripped from the Sun's gravitational pull, contradicting the well-known fact that nothing travels faster than light."

Black holes intensely warp spacetime, merging past and future and blending matter with energy. Such extreme warping challenges ordinary notions of causality, space and time. Some black holes could be gateways to regions where spacetime rules transform into unfamiliar physics. Many objects identified as black holes might be externally identical imposters with different interior behavior. Distinguishing true black holes from imposters requires probing their boundaries and the underlying structure of spacetime. Classical Newtonian gravity implied instantaneous action at a distance, conflicting with finite light speed. Einstein resolved this by recognizing that all objects fall the same way, leading to curved spacetime dynamics.

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