Hello Friends,
Ok, strap yourselves in. We're getting sciency today. And a little fuzzy.
It seems we have a problem with black holes. Who knew?
It's not the "Look out! Here comes a black hole!" type of problem." It's more of a "That cute, giant great white shark is sad" type of problem.
One of our current theories about black holes is that they form when stars collapse under their own gravity. When stars get really old, they get fragile, and like a well-constructed row of dominos, once they start to collapse, they don't stop. It's one possible outcome of a supernova.
Their massiveness under the force of gravity cause them to squeeze into a single point so dense that nothing escapes. The problem is the point (you remember a one-dimensional point from high school math).
Now, these points can be big or tiny, but the physics defines the center of a black hole as a singularity—a single point of infinite mass. (By the way, Singularity is the name of one of my characters in my AI trilogy, Proteus Unbound)
Singularities are how we conceptualize black holes. Einstein gave us this. And Hawking gave us some more.
But, you know what they say about good intentions…
Stephen Hawking was hanging out one day and started thinking about black holes. Not one, but two. He was poking at the maths (I'm saying maths because he's British). As a thought experiment, he conceived of 2 distinct stars going supernova.
In this case, it would be possible for both stars to become black holes of similar characteristics—since a black hole is simply a singularity (a point) with an event horizon (all the stuff falling into it). If you were to look at these two black holes, they could appear identical.
And, this is a problem in physics. Because our theories are based on this sticky notion of conservation—conservation of energy and conservation of matter. Really, though, in math, it all breaks down to the conservation of information. Information being the types of elementary particles that makes up matter and their associated movement and location in the universe (energy).
But, having two similar black holes, in terms of them being constructed of points, disobeys the laws of conservation—we could never tell which star created which black hole, which star's foundational elements got smooshed into a singularity.
And, therefore, we lost information; we violated the laws of conservation.
This became known as the Hawking Paradox. See, it is such a problem that it has its own name.
Look out! Here comes the Fuzz!
When math(s) don't work out in physics, it's beyond frustrating. So frustrating that physicist come up with all kinds of wacky things to make the math work out—one of these being the multiverse (a future newsletter) and another is Superstring Theory. Or, more colloquially, String Theory.
String Theory or Supersymmetric String Theory basically tries to describe the universe as being made up of really tiny vibrating strings. They are so tiny, they can expand into 10 or 11 dimensions, like guppies slipping through a net.
It goes on to suggest that all elementary particles, electron, protons, muons, etc are just the expression of vibrating strings, sort of like how music can come from a plucked harp. It's reasonable, even though it's weird if you consider that our current (crazy) understanding of the quantum realm is that everything is mostly empty space and atoms. I mean, why not?
It's a bit poetic, too, if you think about it. Our universe is just a song.
Any who… It seems that one thought around black holes is that they are not single points, but … here it is.. a fuzzball of strings. Imagine grabbing a pile of colored yarn and squeezing it into a ball. Besides making the cat unhappy, you'd be holding a fuzzy ball of strings.
A fuzzball black hole is not a singularity with an event horizon. It’s a black hole whose event horizon is the outer surface of the fuzzball. This solves the Hawking Paradox by allowing anything that falls into a black hole to become more strands of string joining the ball, maintaining the laws of conservation.
The math works out.
Now the really weird thing is that even though string theory has been with us for over 50 years, we actually haven't seen any evidence of it in reality. … You like apples?
There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.
John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday
And, of course, there are other theories that aim to solve the black hole information paradox. Fuzzy McFuzzball just happens to be my favorite.
Happy reading and happy writing,
David