New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes

Summary

• Near the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density, called a singularity, where all of space and time break down.
• In the late 1960s, scientists exploring the behavior near singularities hypothesized that extreme gravity might cause each point in space to behave on its own terms, decoupling from every other point, like pixels on a screen.
• This makes the math much simpler, though still quite complicated.
• If this decoupling takes place, they showed, the inside of a black hole is a mishmash, rather unlike the smoothly stretching of space and time that an earlier solution had suggested.
• In the decades since, physicists and mathematicians have sought to show that this chaotic dynamics is not an artifact of a simplifying assumption, but inherent to black holes.

By Lyndie Chiou

Original Article