Scientists Are Mapping the Bizarre, Chaotic Spacetime Inside Black Holes

The original version to This story Appear Quanta magazine.

At the beginning of the time and the center of each black hole lies an endless density point called uniqueness. To explore these puzzles, we take what we know about the place, time, gravity, and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all these things simply collapse. Perhaps nothing in the universe challenges imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they can A new understanding of the area and time factory.

In the late 1960s, some physicists speculated that uniqueness may be surrounded by an amazing area of ​​chaos, as space and time grows randomly. Charles Maysner of Maryland was called “The Mix World”, after it was then A popular line of kitchen appliances. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, “one can imagine that it mixes the parts of the astronaut’s body the way in which the mixture or eggs mix eggs and white yolks from eggs,” Cape ThorneNobel Prize -winning physicist.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which is used to describe the danger of black holes, uses one field to explain how to move space and material movements. But this equation uses a Sports abbreviation called the tensioner To hide 16 interlocking equations. Many scientists, including Misner, have created useful simplification assumptions to allow them to explore scenarios such as the world of Mixmaster.

Without these assumptions, Einstein’s equation cannot be resolved analytically, and even with her was very complicated for numerical simulations at that time. Like the device called in their name, these ideas fell from the style. “These dynamics are supposed to be a very general phenomenon in gravity,” he said. Girpin OllingPost -PhD Researcher at Edinburgh University. “But something fell out of the map.”

In the past few years, physicists have re -visited chaos on vocabulary with new sports tools. Their goals are two parts. One hope is to show that the estimates made by Misner and others are correct to be correct for Einsteinian. The other is to approach more vocabulary in the hope that its maximum will help reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics in quantum gravity theory, which was the goal of physicists for more than a century. like Sean Hartnol From Cambridge University, “It is time now until these ideas are fully developed.”

Mixmaster chaos

Thorne described the late 1960s as the “Golden Age” for the research of the black hole. The term “black hole” was only widely used. In September 1969, on a visit to Moscow, Thorne got a manuscript by Evgeny Lifshitz, a prominent Ukrainian physicist. with Vladimir Bellinski And ISAAKCHALATNIKOV, Lifschitz found a new solution for Einstein’s equations for gravity near the uniqueness, using the assumptions that the three created. Lifshitz was afraid that the Soviet censorship would delay the spread of the result, because it contradicts a previous evidence of his authorship, so thorne asked her to participate in the West.

The black hole models earlier assumed the perfect similarities that are not in nature, for example, that the star was an ideal ball before collapse in a black hole, or that he had no net electrical charge. (These assumptions allowed Einstein’s equations, in the simplest forms, by Karl Schwarzchild Soon after Einstein. The result was not a smooth extension of the place and time inside, but rather a reckless sea of ​​place and time extending and pressing in multiple directions.

Thorne evaded the paper to the United States and sent a copy to Mitner, who knew he was thinking of similar lines. It turns out that Misner and the Soviet group have independently slipped on the same ideas using similar assumptions and various technologies. Moreover, the BKL group “used it to solve the largest problem that was not solved in that era in sports relativity,” Thorne said, regarding the existence of what is known as the “general” uniqueness. BKL TRO said in an email that Misner’s vital description of his role helped him to imagine the chaotic situation near the equestrian that both revealed.