Gideon Koekoek at Aeon Magazine:
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. In this sense, they also warp our everyday intuitions about space, time and causality, making them both chicken and egg at once.
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.
more here.
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