In this episode we learn about mind-bending features of black holes, and peer inside with the aid of a new theory of particle physics and gravitation that reveals how a black hole might die.
You can listen to this podcast or read the article, below.
Let’s start with a choose-your-own adventure!
You are being chased through space by an alien spaceship. You fall out of hyperspace in a system with a black hole. The alien ship is tight on your heels. A yawning darkness, devoid of stars, stretches out in front of you.
With the damage to the alien ship’s thrusters, you know it wouldn’t dare risk a close encounter with a black hole. But if you decide to veer toward the horizon to escape its clutches, you run the risk of falling in to the cavernous emptiness and breaching the unknowable universe within.
What do you do? (Please vote! This poll was restarted after merging the article and podcast.)
When I was ten, I read a science fiction choose-your-own adventure book. It was pulpy and an epitome of its genre. One wrong decision would send you hurtling through a black hole, which might have transported you through time or space, and often to your miserable death. (Start over.)
Soon (by age 11) I was reading science nonfiction, the kind of books I would write decades later, to understand what Einstein’s theories had to say about the crazy reality of black holes.
Science fiction has been getting more scientifically accurate over the years. Consider the scene in the Star Trek reboot movie in which the USS Enterprise is trying to escape from the gravitational clutches of a black hole. Kirk asks “Why aren’t we at warp?” and the answer from the helmsman is “we are, sir!” yet they are not moving in space.
In Kip Thorne’s excellent book Black Holes and Time Warps, he explains that at the horizon of a black hole, you would experience something like this, even if you could move at light speed, you would be standing still, because space is bent so severely that the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.
The movie Interstellar (the basic plot for which is lifted from a page of Kip Thorne’s book) was also a combination of hard science fiction and bizarre fantasy. What it got right was that that gravity alters the rate at which time flows - slowing it down for those near very massive objects. What it got wrong… well, I won’t spoil it. The movie also provided the first scientifically accurate visualization of what a black hole might look like, up close.
Because a black hole bends the paths of light so severely, when you look at it, you can see around to the far side. To illustrate this effect, the black hole Gargantua is shown with an accretion disk of plasma surrounding it, like the rings of Saturn. The far side of the ring appears as a halo on the top and bottom- you are looking at is as if from above and below. It’s awesome. Each frame of this scene took 100 hours of rendering on supercomputers to produce.
Black holes are still a huge mystery, a crucible in which Einstein’s theory of gravity (general relativity) and our theory of matter (quantum mechanics) intersect and generate nonsense answers. This reveals that our scientific theories are still a work in progress, not yet applicable to the most extreme environments in nature.
When Randell Mills proposed a new theory of nature in 1991, it offered a new vision for the structure of fundamental particles. It also offered a small modification to Einstein’s theory of gravity with wide impact on our understanding of the universe. We live in a golden age of astronomy, and many of the predictions Mills made in the 1990’s have already been confirmed by astrophysicists. We will discuss some of them in this article. Mills’s theory also makes some predictions about the nature of black holes. Most exciting is that his theory prohibits the formation of a “singularity” at the center - a point of infinitesimal size and infinite mass density.
For the new edition of my book, I decided to learn a little more about black holes and speculate on how Mills’s theory might reframe our understanding of them. The results are fascinating to my inner 10-year-old.
So, let’s get started.
What is a Black Hole?
While Newton described gravity with a simple force law, in Einstein’s General Relativity, space - or rather spacetime - is described as a kind of stretchable membrane.
If you jumped off a building, you wouldn’t experience the force of gravity as you fell, you would simply accelerate toward the ground. We only experience the force of gravity because we are held up by the ground. (In a sense, the gravity we feel is the ground pushing up on us!)
In a sense, while you are in free fall, you are still moving along a straight line, it is just bent by gravity toward massive objects. Even particles of light, with no mass, fall toward massive objects for the same reason.
Another important feature of Einstein’s theory is the impact on time. The closer you get to a massive object, the slower time passes, relative to someone outside of the gravitational field. (In the movie Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey’s character ages more slowly than his daughter for this reason.) This tells us that every point in space has its own internal clock for the rate at which time passes.
Something analogous is true in Einstein’s Special Relativity, which tells us that the faster you are moving through space the slower time passes. As you approach the speed of light, time would effectively stop for you, relative to an observer at rest. In the same way, if gravity is strong enough, time can stop for you relative to an observer outside the gravitational field.
A black hole is a star that has collapsed into matter so dense that a beam of light emitted from it will not escape. Since gravity weakens with distance, there is a boundary where light cannot escape (called the “event horizon”). This is also the boundary where the gravitational field is so intense that time also comes to a stop. A black hole is a collapsing star frozen in time.
To show that time must stop at the horizon, imagine that you are in a spacecraft trying to escape the black hole. You accelerate to nearly light speed, at which point time slows to a stop. Yet, because light cannot escape the black hole, you stand still at the horizon. It is like you are rowing upstream in a river, at the speed of light, but the current matches your speed. In this analogy, space is flowing in to any massive object with gravity; near a black hole, the flow reaches the speed of light.
Inside a Black Hole
So what happens inside the black hole, inside the boundary at which time stops? This is a great question, but we need to change our frame of reference.
Instead of being an outside observer, we should imagine we are standing on the surface of a star as it collapses into a black hole. This can happen when a massive star (at least 20 times the mass of our Sun) runs out of fuel and begins to cool, causing it to shrink. If you were somehow able to survive standing on the surface during a collapse, you wouldn’t notice any change in the passage of time as the star shrank into a black hole; this is because you exist in time. Instead, you might begin to notice that things happening around you in the universe begin to speed up.
Your experience will be short lived, from your point of view. According to modern physics, there are no forces in nature have the power to stop the star from collapsing into an infinitesimal point - a singularity. It is as if you are falling into a chasm, the bottom of which continues to fall away. You fall forever into a bottomless pit, like that scene from Bill and Ted’s Bonus Journey when they are falling into Hell. (Except, you are also being crushed into a point.)
Einstein actually thought - or perhaps hoped - that black holes couldn’t exist. In a thought experiment, he imagined a cluster of particles orbiting along circular orbits, held together by gravity but held apart at a fixed radius. When a star made of these particles shrank to a certain size, angular momentum would accelerate the particles to the speed of light, prohibiting it from shrinking more. This radius was larger than the critical one needed for a star to collapse into a black hole (the Schwarzschild radius), so Einstein argued they could not exist.
Einstein’s reasoning was wrong, because a star can collapse below the critical radius without passing through a state in which the matter is in a stable circular orbit defined by a spherical shell. However, Einstein’s argument has some merit that relates to Mills’s new theory.
Before the invention of quantum mechanics, physicists speculated that particles could be explained as “classical” objects made of mass and charge, not funny statistical clouds. These objects could be imagined as extended surfaces like shells instead of points. In a classical theory of matter, a spherical particle with angular momentum will need to spin faster the smaller it gets. This is just like how an ice skater spins faster when she pulls in her arms. But a particle can only be crushed to the point at which the particle’s spin reaches the speed of light. At that point, it will be impossible to make the particle any smaller. This is an argument for why there may be no singularity at the center of a black hole.
The fact that we can’t make this argument using quantum mechanics shows that the quantum model is horrid. In Mills’s new theory, particles are extended classical objects. Mills was able to solve the structure of them as no physicist had before, thanks to an advancement in the theory of electrodynamics made at MIT in 1986, where Mills was a student, by his professor Herman Haus. Haus showed, for the first time, how classical particles could remain stable.
According to Mills’s theory, particles are spherical shells of spinning mass and charge. In a black hole, Einstein’s argument holds true: they can only get so small before the speed of light plays a role. (The electron, for example, reaches this point when it is exactly 137 times smaller than the size of the hydrogen atom.) The heavy core of a collapsing star starts as heavy atoms like iron, but as it collapses, the electrons and protons of atoms crush together to make neutrons. This is what makes up a neutron star. But a black hole is even more dense.
We don’t know what the state of matter in a black hole looks like. When I asked Mills about this, he mentioned the possibility of forming multiplex neutrons or a metallic lattice of quarks and gluons. Regardless of exactly how the material is composed, there is a limit on how small this material can get.
Beyond the Horizon
But what happens when you pass through the boundary at which time stops? Does time go backwards? Do you warp to another universe?
Physicists found that inside the horizon, time becomes an imaginary number. If you recall middle school math, you can never multiply a number with itself and get a negative number. So, the square root of a negative number is denoted “i,” the square root of negative one. Imaginary numbers are not real, but they are useful.
This flabbergasted theoreticians. What does it mean for time to be imaginary?
Eventually it was realized that time only becomes imaginary for an observer who is standing still inside the horizon. At the horizon, you need to be moving at the speed of light to escape; inside the horizon, you would need to be moving at greater than light speed even to be standing still. So, nothing is standing still. Everything inside the boundary is moving into the center of the black hole, toward the singularity. To use our analogy of rowing a boat upstream, we might say that space itself is flowing inward at a rate greater than light speed, so you would need to be defying physics just to be standing still.
But how is it possible for everything to be moving inward, and yet, to end up with any physically real structure at the center that is not a point?
A New Theory of Gravity
I mentioned before that Mills’s new particle theory led him to a small modification of Einstein’s theory. Let’s see how that changes things.
If you solve Einstein’s theory for the simplest case of a spherical mass like a star, you get a solution first developed by Schwarzschild. Since Mills’s particles are spherical shells, Mills’s equation for gravity produced by an individual particle is a slight modification to Schwarzschild’s solution. In fact, the only change is that the gravitational field is produced by the surface of the particle, whereas inside, spacetime is normal and flat.
According to Mills’s theory, gravitation is a byproduct of special relativity. When a photon of light, moving at light speed, transforms into a pair of particles (a particle and antiparticle pair) moving at less than light speed, there is a relativistic contraction of spacetime around the particle to ensure that the speed of light is not violated during this process. The contraction means that lengths change and time slows down (just like they do for space travelers at near light speeds). This is what we call a gravitational field.
And similar to a black hole, when a particle forms, the contraction of space is measured in units of imaginary time. It is for the same reasons. When a particle forms, stationary observers do not exist, anywhere in the universe. The entire universe moves toward the center of the newly formed particle. This doesn’t happen all at once, because the relativistic correction must propagate outward, in an ever widening sphere, at the speed of light.
Mills’s theory is extraordinarily powerful. For starters, he is able to calculate the masses of fundamental particles with simple equations. He even published the mass of the top quark before it was found in supercolliders.
This proves that Mills’s theory is, in fact, the Grand Unified Theory of Physics, because it stitches together our understanding of the very small with that of the very large in one coherent whole. The equations making up Mills’s theory, those governing the universe, are simply Maxwell’s equations, the laws of electrodynamics. These equations were written 150 years ago, by candlelight, but it wasn’t until 1986 that we understood how they could result in a theory of particles.
As a corollary to the contraction of space that occurs during the formation of a particle, there is an expansion of space when the particle dies. This happens when particles are annihilated back into energy, or any process in which matter is released as energy, such as fusion. When this happens, spacetime expands - literally pushing space out a little bit. This is enormously impactful on modern cosmology.
From this result, Mills predicted that the universe should be accelerating in its outward expansion, because untold billions of stars are undergoing fusion and pushing out space. Astronomers discovered this in 1997 and called it “dark energy.” Unfortunately, Mills has not yet been credited for such a monumental prediction, although I expect it to eventually result in a Nobel Prize.
Further, Mills predicts that there was no Big Bang. Near the beginning of the expansion cycle of our universe, we should nevertheless see evidence for ancient structures such as billion-year-old galaxies and black holes that predate the expansion cycle. This is now being confirmed by the results from the James Webb Space Telescope, which is looking deeper into the early universe than ever before. It is creating a crisis in cosmology. Another Nobel Prize there.
The death of black holes
In another, more speculative possibility, according to Mills’s theory, if particles are crushed by gravity intensely enough, they can spontaneously convert to light.
Mills found from his equations for particle masses that a new kind of particle would exist if it were not for the fact that the resulting mass would be so high that the gravitational escape velocity of the particle and antiparticle would be the speed of light. This means they could never form. If matter is crushed to sufficient density, such as at the center of a black hole, particles could try - and fail - to create these extremely high-mass particles. Instead they would annihilate directly into energy, forming very high-energy photons.
Unlike Einstein’s theory, for Mills, light does not produce gravitation. So, any particles annihilated into light would deplete the mass of a black hole. Creating these particles would also push out space. It is possible that a black hole, crushing the matter within to a critical density, could erupt with light - evaporating the horizon.
Such an eruption would be the most powerful in nature, releasing in only a few seconds as much energy as the Sun does over its entire lifetime. The blast would destroy everything within a radius of several light years. Shining in the high-energy gamma-ray wavelengths, it would outshine its galaxy and would be seen billions of light years away.
As it turns out, we observe mysterious events in space that fit this description: they are called gamma-ray bursts (GRB’s). These sudden flashes are a hundred times more energetic than a supernova. Astrophysicists believe GRBs could be caused by the merging of two neutron stars, also an incredibly energetic event. They are without a doubt the most luminous events in the universe, somewhat rare. In our galaxy, it might happen a few times in a million years.
When we track the light that falls on Earth from space, we find incredibly energetic cosmic rays. We don’t know what could possibly have made them. Perhaps they originated in a supernova, or the merging of neutron stars, or perhaps they are the dying breath of a black hole.
Since, according to Mills’s theory, anything that gives off an incredible amount of energy would also push out spacetime, this allowed me to infer, while writing the manuscript for the first edition of my book, that we ought to observe gravitational waves coinciding with GRB’s. As it turned out, the first gravitational wave observed was simultaneous with a GRB. My mind was blown. I had made my first confirmed prediction about the universe.
GRBs are so powerful that it is theorized that if one occurred nearby in the galaxy, it could create a mass extinction event. On October 9, 2022, a GRB from two billion years ago reached Earth and noticeably impacted the ionosphere in a way similar to the impact of a solar flare. An event as close as 6,500 light-years away could deplete the ozone layer, cause acid rain, and cause the Earth to cool. Perhaps this is what happened at the end of the Ordovician period, about 443 million years ago.
From the natural rate of occurrence of GRBs, we ought to expect a dangerously close GRB about once every 500 million years. These events may be the harbinger of the age of biospheres and civilizations. Most of the complex life on Earth evolved in that time. Apparently, we are due.
A reverse-horizon?
If space is flowing into the center of a black hole, everything inside must be compressing until it reaches the critical density that would trigger a GRB. Perhaps, when we observe a black hole, we are witnessing a freeze-frame of their inexorable death, although it may take millions or billions of years.
However, there is one other possibility that I can imagine.
In Newton’s theory, an object at the center of a star would feel no gravitational forces, just the crushing pressure of the surrounding material. This is because the force vectors cancel out. But Einstein’s equation for General Relativity says that the curvature of space is proportional to the amount of matter nearby as well as the pressure of the surrounding matter. An object at the center would experience the most extreme gravitation and time dilation.
When a black hole forms, it starts at the center, where the mass is most dense, and expands outward like a bubble until it envelops the star.
According to Mills’s theory, particles only produce gravitational fields on the exterior surface of their shell. In this context, Einstein’s equation describes bulk matter consisting of many individual particles clumped into a disorganized mass. But if particles could be arranged into concentric shells like the layers of an onion, forming membrane-like planes, the gravitational field would diminish as you move into the center. At the very center, you would have flat (normal) space, despite being the most dense state of matter in the universe.
If this is possible, somewhere in the black hole, perhaps a few kilometers from the center, would be a boundary at which the gravitational mass falls below the critical point needed to form a black hole. It would be a reverse-horizon, analogous to the outer horizon.
If matter arranges itself into a concentric state starting at the center, this reverse horizon would also start in the center and expand outward like a bubble, stopping only where the gravitational mass reaches the critical point. Inside the boundary, you would have normal space. Everything outside of the boundary would move inward, and therefore crush to the surface of a shell.
According to Mills’s theory, particles are infinitesimally thin membranes. Electrons, occupying shells around the atom, can form concentric shells. Inside the reverse-horizon, particle shells might repel one another to make thickness. But outside the reverse-horizon, you would have an incredibly dense shell of matter made up of indistinguishable particles with no thickness. Any thickness would be stamped out by the need for anything outside the critical radius to be moving inward. It is not a point-singularity, but a shell-singularity.
Although the horizon of a black hole extends out far past the interior matter, the object itself - the dark star inside - would have a finite radius equal to that of the reverse horizon. The spacetime curvature would look like a doughnut.
This is all assuming that the density of this shell would not reach that needed to annihilate particles as light, and kill the black hole. But it is a fascinating possibility for the next generation of physicists to explore.
The results of the chose-your-own adventure!
If you selected “Risk a dogfight with the ship.”
You pull away from the black hole and face the alien ship, preparing for a dog fight. You launch a missile at the ship, which is almost immobilized due to its thrusters. In anticipation, the ship releases a swarm of thousands of A.I. drones that each target the missile with a laser; the result is an explosion in space - a miss.
As you prepare to launch a second missile, the drones target your hull from a thousand points in space. There is an explosion, and you feel yourself hurtled out into the void. As you tumble into the mute darkness, you feel your insides straining against the membranes of your body, as your saliva and sweat boils away. Your head feels like it is about to explode. Clenching your teeth, you resign yourself to your agonizing fate.
Within a minute, you have lost consciousness.
If you selected “Veer into the black hole.”
As you veer toward the black hole, you say goodbye to the universe you once knew. Your ship begins to creak, and you feel a strong pull on your feet - the spaghetti effect. To counteract this, you lay down on the floor, but still your whole body is racked by the difference in G-forces between your back and your front.
Looking out the window, the universe appears to go blue, and contract, almost to a point. You are now only seeing only light that falls directly on the black hole from above, and it soon shifts out of the visible range as it becomes cosmic radiation. The alien ship is now a thing of the distant past, and to your eyes, there is only blackness.
85 years later, your grandchild - an esteemed physicist, by chance - finds the exact point where you dipped into the horizon of the black hole, and releases a canister there. Seconds later, you see the canister float by your ship, and with great effort, you operate the controls to seize it and bring it into the airlock. It is a note, giving you a trajectory that might allow you one chance to escape.
The note tells you to jump to hyperspace and come out exactly in the center of the black hole, where you will find a hollow region of normal space inside the “reverse horizon.” It also tells you to launch a missile at the inside surface of the shell and jump immediately into hyperspace on an escape trajectory. The missile should trigger a compression wave that results in a gamma-ray burst.
You follow the instructions exactly, and jump into hyperspace at precisely the moment where the missile impacts the shell. The black hole evaporates and releases hell-fury on surrounding space. Waiting for another hour to get distance, you drop out of hyperspace. You are free.
Although your grandson has passed away, you connect with your middle-aged great-granddaughter, with whom you become great friends.
Thoughts and questions? Subscribe to join the conversation.
For further reading, this topic is covered in the chapter: The Unified Theory in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: how the hydrino is sparking a revolution in physics and clean energy by Brett Holverstott.
I highly recommend Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne. I enjoyed this link on Schwarzschild geometry.
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