Where Nature Hides the Darkest Mystery of All

Nautilus ^ | 28 Apr, 2016 | Matthew Francis

[MtnClimber]

There’s no boundary quite like a black hole boundary. No known object in existence has as clear a division between “inside” and “outside” as a black hole. We live and see the outside, and no probe will bring us information about the inside. We can send radio messages or robotic spacecraft, but once they cross over into a black hole’s interior, we’ll never get back those emissaries … or any information about what happened to them.

The boundary of a black hole is its event horizon. It’s not a surface in the usual sense—there’s no physical barrier—but it’s very much a real thing. Outside the horizon, an object can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull if it’s moving sufficiently fast; inside, it would need to move faster than light-speed, something forbidden by the laws of nature.

In a meaningful sense, a black hole is its event horizon, since we can’t observe anything inside it by any method. The interior is nature’s biggest secret, enshrouded by a barrier that lets everything in but nothing out.....

The interior of a black hole isn’t merely an inaccessible region of the cosmos. It’s a laboratory for the most extreme physics: the strongest gravity and the most intense of quantum processes. For that reason, physicists are interested in understanding what goes on inside, even while they are frustrated by the lack of direct experiments or observations that could test their ideas.

[Reeses]

Yet nature still hides the mystery of what lies inside a black hole, perhaps forever.

And perhaps the big bang was a black hole that exploded.