Few things are as mysterious as black holes. Except, of course, what would happen to you if you fell into one.
Physicists have been debating what might happen to anyone unfortunate enough to slip toward the singularity, and so far, they’ve come up with approximately 2.5 ways you might die, from being stretched like spaghetti to burnt to a crisp.
The fiery hypothesis is a product of Stephen Hawking’s firewall theory, which also says that black holes eventually evaporate, destroying everything inside. But this violates a fundamental principle of physics—that information cannot be destroyed—so other physicists, including Samir Mathur, have been searching for ways to address that error.
Here’s Marika Taylor, writing for The Conversation:
The general relativity description of black holes suggests that once you go past the event horizon, the surface of a black hole, you can go deeper and deeper. As you do, space and time become warped until they reach a point called the “singularity” at which point the laws of physics cease to exist. (Although in reality, you would die pretty early on on this journey as you are pulled apart by intense tidal forces).
In Mathur’s universe, however, there is nothing beyond the fuzzy event horizon.
Mathur’s take on black holes suggests that they aren’t surrounded by a point-of-no-return event horizon or a firewall that would incinerate you, but a fuzzball with small variations that maintain a record of the information that fell into it. What does touch the fuzzball is converted into a hologram. It’s not a perfect copy, but a doppelgänger of sorts.
Perhaps more bizarrely, you even wouldn’t be aware that of the transformation. Say you were to be sucked toward a black hole. At the point where you’d normally hit the event horizon, Mathur says, you’d instead touch the fuzzy surface. But instead of noticing anything, the fuzzy surface would appear like any other part of space immediately around you. Everything would seem the same as it was, except that you’d be a hologram.
