Staff writer Ekaterina Khusnetdinova discusses what Black Holes are and their implications in the theory of information and multiple dimensions.
A Black Hole is a point of gravitational collapse; where energy and density are so high that even light cannot escape its gravity.
Some theorise that Black Holes are direct portals to other worlds that measure the age of our Universe, leaking energy into it.
The Mystery
The human urge for knowledge has always led us to incredible discoveries. But is there anything in this world that we fully understand?
We all are prisoners of the paradox: the more you know, the less you know. For any thing we could imagine there will be a perspective that proves that you cannot fully understand its nature. This is what a Black Hole is.
Our world is a cycle of different systems – the cell cycle, the life cycle, the orbital cycle, the cycle of a star, a galaxy and finally the Universe itself. But then you ask, what role does the Black Hole play in all this and what is the purpose of it all?
Information is exactly what the Black Hole holds, the key to our desires.
The Story of a Black Hole
In simple terms, a Black Hole is a supermassive object usually born from a dead star. Stars spend their lifetime creating new elements through nuclear fusion.
When a star of sufficient size explodes after its core has completely turned into iron, stopping the fusion completely, space collapses to form a singularity. In other words an object with zero volume and infinite density, that made Einstein sceptic about the physical application of his Theory of General Relativity.
Event Horizon
However, in order to understand where the Black Hole tearing apart the space-time continuum leads us, we should look at its edge — Event Horizon.
This is a place that even light cannot escape.
The Holographic Principle states that the Event Horizon is a two-dimensional hologram that displays the entire history of the Black Hole, thus the information that fell into it.
Material Nature of Information
But what is information?
There are probably dozens of definitions and interpretations of this word, but in our space, energy is the only information that matters.
Black Holes slowly lose energy as they emit light energy, called Hawking radiation.
Many scientists have debated whether information is erased forever through Hawking radiation, or whether it remains and becomes unrecoverable. The answer to this question lies in the seemingly simple and often overlooked thermodynamics.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Returning to the question of information, how is it encoded in material energy? This is a question of the Planck scale, a system of measurements so small that the standard laws of Physics break down.
The Falsely Empty Vacuum
Heisenberg’s uncertainty states that the mere act of observing something changes its outcome. This means that we will never be able to fully experience and understand each process in the Universe.
There are interactions going on in seemingly empty space which we might never understand.
Vacuum fluctuations are one of those things. Its structure is seething with particles and antiparticles with a life cycle so small we call them virtual and consider a vacuum space — empty.
Vacuum fluctuations drain the dead star collapsed body, the Black Hole, through particles with negative energy falling into the Event Horizon. A vacuum encrypts information that we might never see.
However, when matter or antimatter from the vacuum falls int a Black Hole, its information is recorded by the Holographic Principle.
Heat Death of The Universe
Returning to the black hole, understanding that information doesn’t disappear suggests they could be used as timers.
The timer of the Universe itself is entropy (disorder).
When entropy takes over and the Universe perishes from its own energy, the laws of physics and chemistry cease to exist in a form we understand; the Universe ruptures like a membrane that has collected the history of all events. At that point all the dead star remains would evaporate.
However, the Black Hole does not disappear into meaningless thermal noise; instead, it creates a literal puncture in the fabric of our spacetime continuum, pulling this thermodynamic data into the next dimension.
A Bolt from The Blue — Theory of Relativity
Despite the fantastic and even delusional nature of this situation for an ordinary human brain, which has developed with a clear understanding of three-dimensional space and even formulated it thousands of years ago since the time of Aristotle.
Our brains developed to understand three-dimensional space, so struggles to grasp this idea of other dimensions.
A century ago, humanity got struck by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity — incredibly ground breaking and true, but also as true in the macro world as it is false in extreme points.
Time slows down and is curved by mass and energy. Time is continuously connected to distance — they are like a canvas, knitted together.
Black holes tear time and space, going into a completely different dimension, which the human brain is not even capable comprehending.
The Mysteries of Dark Energy and Dark Matter
What’s even more ground-breaking is that Black Holes are not the only objects in the Universe that do not obey our three-dimensional laws. Most people have heard of Dark Matter or Dark Energy and probably wondered: What even is that? Can I see it or touch it?
It’s almost like a sixth sense for observational tools — but only in the form of gravity, flattening and moulding our space-time continuum. It’s something we cannot interact with, but we know for sure that it is present.
The Question to Wonder
This leads to the question: perhaps somewhere out there in the neighbouring Universe in the fifth dimension there is a cluster of galaxies? Perhaps the gravity of those galaxies, their stars and their black holes seeps into our world.
Dark Energy expands our Universe, as if filling it with something that does not belong to it and that it cannot hold, that it cannot feel. It is the echo of an Invisible Hand leading us to heat death, unfolding us like a membrane for observers.
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