Professor Samir Mathur, a theoretical physicist at Ohio State University, has proposed that a black hole is not a singularity but rather a sphere made of the strings of string theory. In his speculation, there is no singularity at the center of a black hole. If I understood what he said in the lecture I listened to, the strings make a volumeless sphere which is all surface and no inside, that spacetime does not exist inside a fuzzball.
I've been thinking about this and again, I do not have the expertise to either agree or disagree with this supposition, but I certainly have the expertise to ponder it. It is an example of the wonderful ability of scientists to imagine solutions to a problem that might not exist. The problem Professor Mathur seemed to want to solve is the problem of infinite spacetime curvature and zero volume at the singularity, and the information paradox.
I don't know what happens inside the event horizon of a black hole. I don't know what happens at the event horizon. I have been told that time seems to stop for an object entering the horizon, to an outside observer but the object itself may not notice it has crossed the point of no return until it is torn apart by increasing tidal forces - what Kip Thorne called spaghettification - or destroyed by the energy released by the disentanglement of the particles that make up Hawking radiation - the one falling in giving off this energy, or perhaps something else. It is all speculation and depending on the theorists stand on various aspects of quantum theory, general relativity, the views have yet to be reconciled.
Fuzzballs is an attempt to resolve these differences. The problem is, there is no way to test this, nor, at this time, any of the other things I've mentioned. So I've decided to listen to the lectures, read the books and take pleasure in the mind-bending possibilities of our universe at its most extreme.
Maybe one day I'll write something on my take on the anthropic principle.
Some people need to leave a mark. These photos are of some graffiti and stickers posted on a viaduct across the railroad tracks that run through Hudson Highlands State Park.
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