Is the universe a hologram? The strange physics of black holes | Michelle Thaller | Big Think

Black holes really are kind of getting to the very heart of our physics. And I believe that they're kind of showing us the way that eventually we're going to need different physics and new physics.

People ask questions like, "What happens inside a black hole?" Or even, "What happens at the very boundary of a black hole, the event horizon, when light is absorbed?" And honestly, our physics is telling us a lot of contradictory things. And our image of what an event horizon really is may be changing.

People like Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind have recently come up with this idea that a black hole should not be able to destroy information. O.K., what do we mean by information? Information can be almost anything. All of the different atoms in my body have angular momentum, they have charge, they have mass. There's all sorts of little bits of information that make me me.

At the quantum mechanic level, the tiniest of levels, there are different amounts of energy, there are different probabilities that are contained in the structure of my matter. And information, in some ways, is a form of energy. It's actually a way that you can describe something which is somehow, in a strange way, a higher energy state than not being able to describe something.

And so one of the questions is, "If energy really can't be destroyed, energy itself is something that is intrinsic in the universe, you can't really create or destroy it, is it possible that information is the same way? Is there really no way to actually destroy the information about what all of my subatomic particles are doing right now?"

So black holes kind of stare you right in the face. What a black hole supposedly does is it absorbs everything. Space and time bend into a black hole so that nothing can escape. That means that any information about the material that fell in is gone. The only thing we know about it is that as a black hole absorbs material, it gets more massive.

It actually adds that mass to the mass of the black hole. And as that mass increases, the event horizon becomes larger. Basically, the area where space is so curved that you can't get out begins to extend the more massive a black hole is. The most massive black holes we know of in the universe are many billions of times the mass of our sun.

And the physical extent of this event horizon is about the size of our solar system, maybe like out to the planet Pluto. So is it possible, then, if everything goes into a black hole and nothing ever comes out, space and time go inside the black hole and don't come out? What happened to that information?

And this has begun to make a lot of people wonder if we really have thought of black holes the wrong way. Maybe there isn't an event horizon in the true sense. I actually had a friend of mine that studies black holes say, "Well, I'm not sure if they're black. They may be very, very dark navy blue."

And what he meant by that is, maybe there are some tricks to actually get information out of a black hole. Maybe there really is some form of energy that can leak away from the black hole over time. Now, Stephen Hawking wondered if quantum effects very near the event horizon could actually separate something called virtual particles, the energy of space itself.

If you're familiar with Einstein's equation, E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy and mass are the same thing. They're equivalent. You can actually make mass into energy, and you can make energy into mass.

Around a black hole, where there's very hot gas, very high temperatures, very strong magnetic fields, perhaps, there's a lot of energy. And that energy can actually manifest itself as particles, mass. And the energy always creates particle/antiparticle pairs. They're called virtual particles.

And matter and antimatter, the thing you know about it is that it annihilates immediately. So these tiny little particles come into existence, then annihilate, and you're back to energy. And this happens all around us all the time.

So, if this happens near a black hole, it's possible o...