Credit...

Leonardo Santamaria
SKIP TO CONTENT SKIP TO SITE INDEX

Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending

Secret About Our Universe
Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? Just maybe, a holographic
cosmos.

Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
 Share full article




By Dennis Overbye
 Published Oct. 10, 2022Updated Oct. 12, 2022

For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein
and himself.

On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes
gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that
space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those
bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes.

On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum
mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that
Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an
electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead
until it is observed. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained.

Gravity rules outer space, shaping galaxies and indeed the whole universe, whereas
quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. The
two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other; this left scientists ill-
equipped to understand what happens in an extreme situation like a black hole or the
beginning of the universe.

But a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed
unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. The implications are
mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe — and we
ourselves — may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear
on some credit cards and drivers licenses. In this version of the cosmos, there is no
difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even
then and now; household cats can be conjured in empty space. We can all be Dr.
Strange.

“It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same
thing,” Leonard Susskind of Stanford University wrote in a paper in 2017. “But those of
us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that
neither makes sense without the other.”

That insight, Dr. Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines
gravity and quantum mechanics — quantum gravity — and perhaps explains how the
universe began.

Einstein vs. Einstein

The schism between the two Einsteins entered the spotlight in 1935, when the physicist
faced off against himself in a pair of scholarly papers.

In one paper, Einstein and Nathan Rosen showed that general relativity predicted that
black holes (which were not yet known by that name) could form in pairs connected by
shortcuts through space-time, called Einstein-Rosen bridges — “wormholes.” In the
imaginations of science fiction writers, you could jump into one black hole and pop out
of the other.

In the other paper, Einstein, Rosen and another physicist, Boris Podolsky, tried to pull
the rug out from quantum mechanics by exposing a seeming logical inconsistency.
They pointed out that, according to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, a pair
of particles once associated would be eternally connected, even if they were light-years
apart. Measuring a property of one particle — its direction of spin, say — would
instantaneously affect the measurement of its mate. If these photons were flipped coins
and one came up heads, the other invariably would be found out to be tails.

To Einstein this proposition was obviously ludicrous, and he dismissed it as “spooky

action at a distance.” But today physicists call it “entanglement,” and lab experiments
confirm its reality every day. Last week the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a trio
of physicists whose experiments over the years had demonstrated the reality of this
“spooky action.”

The physicist N. David Mermin of Cornell University once called such quantum
weirdness “the closest thing we have to magic.”

As Daniel Kabat, a physics professor at Lehman College in New York, explained it,
“We’re used to thinking that information about an object — say, that a glass is half-full
— is somehow contained within the object. Entanglement means this isn’t correct.
Entangled objects don’t have an independent existence with definite properties of their
own. Instead they only exist in relation to other objects.”
Einstein probably never dreamed that the two 1935 papers had anything in common,
Dr. Susskind said recently. But Dr. Susskind and other physicists now speculate that
wormholes and spooky action are two aspects of the same magic and, as such, are the
key to resolving an array of cosmic paradoxes.

Throwing Dice in the Dark

To astronomers, black holes are dark monsters with gravity so strong that they can
consume stars, wreck galaxies and imprison even light. At the edge of a black hole, time
seems to stop. At a black hole’s center, matter shrinks to infinite density and the known
laws of physics break down. But to physicists bent on explicating those fundamental
laws, black holes are a Coney Island of mysteries and imagination.

In 1974 the cosmologist Stephen Hawking astonished the scientific world with a heroic
calculation showing that, to his own surprise, black holes were neither truly black nor
eternal, when quantum effects were added to the picture. Over eons, a black hole would
leak energy and subatomic particles, shrink, grow increasingly hot and finally explode.
In the process, all the mass that had fallen into the black hole over the ages would be
returned to the outer universe as a random fizz of particles and radiation.

This might sound like good news, a kind of cosmic resurrection. But it was a potential
catastrophe for physics. A core tenet of science holds that information is never lost;
billiard balls might scatter every which way on a pool table, but in principle it is always
possible to rewind the tape to determine where they were in the past or predict their
positions in the future, even if they drop into a black hole.

But if Hawking were correct, the particles radiating from a black hole were random, a
meaningless thermal noise stripped of the details of whatever has fallen in. If a cat fell
in, most of its information — name, color, temperament — would be unrecoverable,
effectively lost from history. It would be as if you opened your safe deposit box and
found that your birth certificate and your passport had disappeared. As Hawking
phrased it in 1976: “God not only plays dice, he sometimes throws them where they can’t
be seen.”

His declaration triggered a 40-year war of ideas. “This can’t be right,” Dr. Susskind, who
became Hawking’s biggest adversary in the subsequent debate, thought to himself when
first hearing about Hawking’s claim. “I didn’t know what to make out of it.”
Image

Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
Encoding Reality
A potential solution came to Dr. Susskind one day in 1993 as he was walking through a
physics building on campus. There in the hallway he saw a display of a hologram of a
young woman.

A hologram is basically a three-dimensional image — a teapot, a cat, Princess Leia —

made entirely of light. It is created by illuminating the original (real) object with a laser
and recording the patterns of reflected light on a photographic plate. When the plate is
later illuminated, a three-dimensional image of the object springs into view at the
center.

“‘Hey, here’s a situation where it looks as if information is kind of reproduced in two

different ways,’” Dr. Susskind recalled thinking. On the one hand, there is a visible
object that “looked real,” he said. “And on the other hand, there’s the same information
coded on the film surrounding the hologram. Up close, it just looks like a little bunch of
scratches and a highly complex encoding.”

The right combinations of scratches on that film, Dr. Susskind realized, could make
anything emerge into three dimensions. Then he thought: What if a black hole was
actually a hologram, with the event horizon serving as the “film,” encoding what was
inside? It was “a nutty idea, a cool idea,” he recalled.

Across the Atlantic, the same nutty idea had occurred to the Dutch physicist, Gerardus ’t
Hooft, a Nobel laureate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

According to Einstein’s general relativity, the information content of a black hole or any
three-dimensional space — your living room, say, or the whole universe — was limited to
the number of bits that could be encoded on an imaginary surface surrounding it. That
space was measured in pixels 10⁻³³ centimeters on a side — the smallest unit of space,
known as the Planck length.

With data pixels so small, this amounted to quadrillions of megabytes per square
centimeter — a stupendous amount of information, but not an infinite amount. Trying
to cram too much information into any region would cause it to exceed a limit decreed
by Jacob Bekenstein, then a Princeton graduate student and Hawking’s rival, and cause
it to collapse into a black hole.

“This is what we found out about Nature’s bookkeeping system,” Dr. ’t Hooft wrote in
1993. “The data can be written onto a surface, and the pen with which the data are
written has a finite size.”

The Soup-Can Universe

The cosmos-as-holograph idea found its fullest expression a few years later, in 1997.
Juan Maldacena, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used
new ideas from string theory — the speculative “theory of everything” that portrays
subatomic particles as vibrating strings — to create a mathematical model of the entire
universe as a hologram.

In his formulation, all the information about what happens inside some volume of space
is encoded as quantum fields on the surface of the region’s boundary.

Dr. Maldacena’s universe is often portrayed as a can of soup: Galaxies, black holes,
gravity, stars and the rest, including us, are the soup inside, and the information
describing them resides on the outside, like a label. Think of it as gravity in a can. The
inside and outside of the can — the “bulk” and the “boundary” — are complementary
descriptions of the same phenomena.

Since the fields on the surface of the soup can obey quantum rules about preserving
information, the gravitational fields inside the can must also preserve information. In
such a picture, “there is no room for information loss,” Dr. Maldacena said at a
conference in 2004.

Hawking conceded: Gravity was not the great eraser after all.

“In other words, the universe makes sense,” Dr. Susskind said in an interview.

“It’s completely crazy,” he added, in reference to the holographic universe. “You could
imagine in a laboratory, in a sufficiently advanced laboratory, a large sphere — let’s say,
a hollow sphere of a specially tailored material — to be made of silicon and other things,
with some kind of appropriate quantum fields inscribed on it.” Then you could conduct
experiments, he said: Tap on the sphere, interact with it, then wait for answers from the
entities inside.

“On the other hand, you could open up that shell and you would find nothing in it,” he
added. As for us entities inside: “We don’t read the hologram, we are the hologram.”
Image
Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
Wormholes, wormholes everywhere
Our actual universe, unlike Dr. Maldacena’s mathematical model, has no boundary, no
outer limit. Nonetheless, for physicists, his universe became a proof of principle that
gravity and quantum mechanics were compatible and offered a font of clues to how our
actual universe works.

But, Dr. Maldacena noted recently, his model did not explain how information manages
to escape a black hole intact or how Hawking’s calculation in 1974 went wrong.

Don Page, a former student of Hawking now at the University of Alberta, took a
different approach in the 1990s. Suppose, he said, that information is conserved when a
black hole evaporates. If so, then a black hole does not spit out particles as randomly as
Hawking had thought. The radiation would start out as random, but as time went on,
the particles being emitted would become more and more correlated with those that had
come out earlier, essentially filling the gaps in the missing information. After billions
and billions of years all the hidden information would have emerged.

In quantum terms, this explanation required any particles now escaping the black hole
to be entangled with the particles that had leaked out earlier. But this presented a
problem. Those newly emitted particles were already entangled with their mates that
had already fallen into the black hole, running afoul of quantum rules mandating that
particles be entangled only in pairs. Dr. Page’s information-transmission scheme could
only work if the particles inside the black hole were somehow the same as the particles
that were now outside.

How could that be? The inside and outside of the black hole were connected by
wormholes, the shortcuts through space and time proposed by Einstein and Rosen in
1935.

In 2012 Drs. Maldacena and Susskind proposed a formal truce between the two warring
Einsteins. They proposed that spooky entanglement and wormholes were two faces of
the same phenomenon. As they put it, employing the initials of the authors of those two
1935 papers, Einstein and Rosen in one and Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in the other:
“ER = EPR.”

The implication is that, in some strange sense, the outside of a black hole was the same
as the inside, like a Klein bottle that has only one side.

How could information be in two places at once? Like much of quantum physics, the
question boggles the mind, like the notion that light can be a wave or a particle
depending on how the measurement is made.

What matters is that, if the interior and exterior of a black hole were connected by
wormholes, information could flow through them in either direction, in or out,
according to John Preskill, a Caltech physicist and quantum computing expert.
“We ought to be able to influence the interior of one of these black holes by ‘tickling’ its
radiation, and thereby sending a message to the inside of the black hole,” he said in a
2017 interview with Quanta. He added, “It sounds crazy.”

Ahmed Almheiri, a physicist at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, noted recently that by manipulating
radiation that had escaped a black hole, he could create a cat inside that black hole. “I
can do something with the particles radiating from the black hole, and suddenly a cat is
going to appear in the black hole,” he said.

He added, “We all have to get used to this.”

The metaphysical turmoil came to a head in 2019. That year two groups of theorists
made detailed calculations showing that information leaking through wormholes would
match the pattern predicted by Dr. Page. One paper was by Geoff Penington, now at the
University of California, Berkeley. And the other was by Netta Engelhardt of M.I.T.; Don
Marolf of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Henry Maxfield, now at Stanford
University; and Dr. Almheiri. The two groups published their papers on the same day.

“And so the final moral of the story is, if your theory of gravity includes wormholes, then
you get information coming out,” Dr. Penington said. “If it doesn’t include wormholes,
then presumably you don’t get information coming out.”

He added, “Hawking didn’t include wormholes, and we are including wormholes.”

Not everybody has signed on to this theory. And testing it is a challenge, since particle
accelerators will probably never be powerful enough to produce black holes in the lab for
study, although several groups of experimenters hope to simulate black holes and
wormholes in quantum computers.

And even if this physics turns out to be accurate, Dr. Mermin’s magic does have an
important limit: Neither wormholes nor entanglement can transmit a message, much
less a human, faster than the speed of light. So much for time travel. The weirdness only
becomes apparent after the fact, when two scientists compare their observations and
discover that they match — a process that involves classical physics, which obeys the
speed limit set by Einstein.

As Dr. Susskind likes to say, “You can’t make that cat hop out of a black hole faster than
the speed of light.”
A correction was made on 
Oct. 10, 2022
: 

An earlier version of this article misidentified the academic affiliation of the physicist
Don Marolf. It is the University of California, Santa Barbara, not the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let
us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998, and has been a reporter since 2001. He has written
two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Search for the Secret of
the Universe” and “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.” More about Dennis Overbye

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2022, Section D, Page 1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Weird and Magical. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 Share full article



Site Index
Site Information Navigation
 © 2023 The New York Times Company
 NYTCo
 Contact Us
 Accessibility
 Work with us
 Advertise
 T Brand Studio
 Your Ad Choices
 Privacy Policy
 Terms of Service
 Terms of Sale
 Site Map
 Help
 Subscriptions