Kind: captions
Language: en
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one of the biggest puzzles in physics
today is one that sounds straight out of
Science Fiction just what would happen
if you fell into a black hole make no
mistake the answer to this bizarre
question is that you would die that's
not up for debate but it's how you would
die that's keeping physicists up at
night there are currently two major
camps fighting over this gruesome
scenario and the outcome of this fight
could actually revolutionize the
fundamental laws of
nature to begin to understand this
controversy you first need to know what
a black hole is black holes form when
stars collapse under their own weight
for most of the past Century scientists
have thought that due to the intense
pull of gravity all the matter that made
up the collapsed star gets squished into
a teeny tiny dot this dot is called a
singularity and it's incredibly massive
and Incredibly dense it's basically a
pit of gravity in the fabric of
SpaceTime and the closer you are to this
dense dot of mass the stronger the pull
of gravity is some physicists describe
this pull as a river that leads to a
waterfall if you're significantly
Upstream of the precipice you can easily
steer your raft to safety but once you
get far enough Downstream no matter how
fast you paddle in the opposite
direction you can't escape the river's
pull and you'll topple over the edge for
black holes this point of no return is
called The Event Horizon and it's the
place where nothing not even the fastest
thing in the universe light can escape
the singularity's gravitational pull so
what would happen if you passed through
an event horizon for years scientists
thought they knew how you would meet
your demise say you were traveling feet
first toward the
singularity initially you wouldn't
notice that you passed any significant
bound B but your feet would experience a
greater gravitational pull than your
head and would begin moving faster than
the rest of your body thus you would get
stretched into a long person noodle
until your body eventually snapped each
noodly piece of you would stretch and
break until you were nothing but a
collection of subatomic particles
smooshed against the rest of the mass at
the singularity this stretching
hypothesis actually has a name
physicists call it
spaghettification the spaghettification
Theory satisfied most physicists for
years but then in 1974 the physicist
Steven Hawking proposed what is now a
widely accepted idea about the nature of
black holes he said that black holes
will eventually evaporate basically
they'll disintegrate this is really
complicated stuff but essentially
they'll start radiating particles from
their Event Horizon and even though
these particles don't come from The
Singularity the mass within the black
hole will start to shrink
but there's just one problem with this
idea it violates a key principle of
quantum physics information cannot be
destroyed and just to clarify when
physicists say information they're
referring to quantum mechanical
properties of the particles that make up
everything in the universe so here's the
issue if by definition matter and
information that gets sucked into a
black hole can't escape then when the
black hole evaporates all that
information stored inside of it would
just disappear until recently many
scientists satisfied their frustration
with this information Paradox by saying
that maybe we just need to think about
the inside and outside of black holes as
different Realms that can't communicate
we could save any information that fell
inside a black hole by allowing it to
exist in two places both stuck inside
and leaking out with the radiation
usually physicists would say that you
can have two different copies of
identical information at once but since
the Realms can't communicate the
particles would get a free pass but then
in 2012 the physicist Joseph Pinsky and
his colleagues realized that the Paradox
might be even more complicated than
anyone previously thought they imagined
what would happen if you had two
entangled particles particles that are
quantum mechanically linked and you
tossed one of them into the black hole
and kept an eye on the other one this
would create a problem by their very
nature the entangled particles would
need to be able to respond to one
another but if you bought into this
whole two Realms concept the particles
couldn't do that so the physicist came
up with a new revolutionary idea about
how black holes might work that got rid
of the problem of these two Realms they
entirely threw out the idea of a black
hole that could spaghettify you saying
that matter doesn't get sucked into a
black hole at all instead matter might
hit the Event Horizon and incinerate the
information about where all that matter
came from and where it goes would get
conserved it might go bouncing off into
the universe but nothing would get
sucked past the Horizon and that's
because there is nothing Beyond the
Horizon according to Pinsky and his
colleagues black holes don't have
centers at
all this is a totally Wild and
problematic idea it's essentially saying
that Beyond this event horizon firewall
you hit the end of the universe and that
throws into question Einstein's theory
of general relativity because it's
literally a rip in the fabric of space
time
itself this firewall idea really rankled
a bunch of physicists including Steven
Hawking who released a two-page
statement that's left the rest of the
physics Community perplexed he's now
said that both concepts of what black
holes are are wrong he wrote that there
are no singularities but that there are
also no event
Horizons instead there are apparent
Horizons which store and scramble all
matter and energy that they suck in this
may solve the entangled particle problem
the two particles are still Quantum
mechanically linked and it may even
solve the information loss issue well
kind of the information is scrambled but
theoretically not irretrievable but
without a singularity to create a strong
gravitational pull it still messes with
general
relativity if this leaves you scratching
your head you're in good company other
physicists are confused why Hawking
proposed this idea so far it just seems
like a third equally problematic
solution so for now you decide if you
fell into a black hole would you rather
be spaghettified toasted or scrambled
frankly they all sound pretty
unappetizing to me
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