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What would it feel like to fall into a black hole? This fanciful question has pit real physicists against each other for decades — and new research from Ohio State has opened up some old wounds.

“There’s a lot of people writing a lot of stuff about black holes and black hole information,” string theorist Nicholas Warner, Ph.D., a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California, tells Inverse. (Warner was not involved with the new study, by the way.)

“Some of it’s brilliant and wonderful and some of it is crap.”

If you go by the theory of general relativity, nothing escapes a black hole. Not even light travels fast enough to free itself from a black hole’s gravitational pull. It’s in the freaking name: A black hole is a spherical maw, floating in the void of space. It is a borg-like agglomeration of matter so dense that it assimilates everything that passes through its event horizon.

Unfortunately, none of this makes any sense from a quantum mechanical perspective. According to the rules, information simply can’t be destroyed, and yet that’s what black holes seem to do. This paradox has birthed a long-simmering intellectual war and, with the publication of the new study in the Journal of High Energy Physics, Ohio State physicists have recently turned up the heat.

“There was no simple fix in physics for this.”

The math at the core of quantum mechanics states that information cannot be obliterated, only converted into new forms: matter consumed into energy, energy forging new combinations of matter, and so on. But every time a complex, information-rich object is crushed into the uniform, impossibly compacted space of a black hole, all of its defining characteristics are lost — either flattened out or stretched into an infinitesimal spaghetti, depending on which theoretical model you choose. But no matter how you wish to think about it, the defining information encoded in that matter would appear to be totally obliterated.

For about a decade and change, Samir Mathur, Ph.D., a professor of physics at Ohio State, has been attempting to apply the higher-order, more multidimensional physical equations of string theory to this, the black hole information problem.

“In 2009, Samir Mathur proved a result about the black hole information paradox that showed it was much worse than we thought,” Warner recalls. “There was no simple fix in physics for this. It was going to require a large-scale rethinking of the physics of the event horizon.”

Mathur is an author on the new paper, an attempt to clarify his team’s string theory-based “fuzzball” resolution to the paradox. The only new problem is that it does so by throwing the controversial rival “firewall” theory under the bus.

In the wake of Mathur’s earlier research, four physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara posited in 2012 that the seeming loss of information around an event horizon (as it does when, say, a genetically unique tree is burned into uniform gray ash) must come with the release of an incredible amount of energy. They proposed that, just underneath the surface of a black hole’s event horizon, there is a spherical “firewall” of energy ready to annihilate anything that dares to enter.

While it provided a working hypothesis for what might happen to all that supposedly lost information inside a black hole, more than a few scientists were unconvinced.

“I can tell you right now: the firewall idea is and always has been preposterous,” Chris Adami, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology, molecular genetics, physics, and astronomy at Michigan State University, tells Inverse.

Adami has been involved in this debate for a while. With a grant from the Army Research Office in 2003, he made an ambitious attempt to resolve the black hole information problem by testing it against some of the emerging principles of quantum communication theory.

Donald Marolf, Ph.D., one of the physicists that first proposed the firewall, waves off the criticisms. He does not believe that Adami’s research is even applicable to the debate because he thinks it misses the real issue at the heart of the black hole paradox: how to account for the “spontaneous emissions” proposed by none other than Stephen Hawking.

“Adami’s work discussed ‘stimulated emission’ by black holes,” Marolf tells Inverse. “But — despite common misconceptions — this has essentially nothing to do with the black hole info problem, which instead concerns the growth of [quantum] entanglement due to ‘spontaneous emission.’”

“I can tell you right now: the firewall idea is and always has been preposterous.”

Stephen Hawking, a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, lecturing at an event honoring NASA's 50th Anniversary in 2008.

The paradox at the heart of the black hole information problem stems from Hawking radiation, an alleged spontaneous emission from black holes that Hawking justified theoretically in 1974.

The realization that a black hole would eventually die out after all these emissions, and the seemingly information-free quality of the Hawking radiation emissions, first indicated how fiercely black holes would bring relativity and quantum mechanics into conflict. Inside Hawking’s version of a black hole, it really looked like information was being destroyed.

Adami’s solution to the paradox addresses stimulated emissions — which contain more information than spontaneous emissions — but if you ask Marolf, that’s not enough to account for the information required to resolve the paradox. Word is still out, however, on Mathur’s theory.

In the classic interpretation of a black hole put forward by general relativity (top diagram), all of the black hole matter is constrained to a hyper-dense singularity at the center. In Mathur's string theory version, complex multidimensional geometries, the 'fuzzball,' emerge throughout the full volume of the black hole and approach tightly underneath the event horizon (bottom diagram).

There wasn’t always beef between these scientists.

In fact, for a while, Mathur’s fuzzball argument was wholly compatible with the firewall theory. He had shown through string theory that the interior of a black hole was not one, incredibly small, hyper-dense singularity surrounded by a powerful sucking void between it and the event horizon, but rather a volume filled with wiggling, multidimensional strings and branes — a “fuzzball” of information-rich materials vibrating out in dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions, and time, that we experience as humans.

To string theorists like Mathur and Warner, the firewall theory addressed only the parts of the fuzzball that are very hot — in other words, it was not all-encompassing or mathematically rigorous, but it also wasn’t wrong.

“I would not say that the firewall argument was completely preposterous,” Mathur tells Inverse, “but the press did not report it accurately, so people were confused.”

Mathur’s new paper, however, takes a less accommodating approach to the firewall argument. At least, it’s no longer compatible with the idea that a person falling into a black hole would get burnt up in some kind of firewall, if it exists. Their explanation — due to some unique features of string theory — um, well, it’s deeply weird.

“This is the crucial part of the new physics,” Mathur says, “In the fuzzball theory, the inside of the black hole is not empty space; it is actually filled with a tangle of strings, branes, et cetera. When something falls into the hole, the hole gets bigger.”

“The question is: when exactly does it expand to its new size? We showed that new strings begin to form when the infalling object is still some distance from the surface of the original fuzzball. So, the infalling object never gets close enough to the original fuzzball surface to feel its heat — the newly formed strings change his infall behavior.”

Think of it as a hand approaching a mirror. Just as your hand can never touch a part of the mirror that isn’t a reflection of it, Mathur says, “similarly, the fuzzball surface moves up to meet the infaller, rather than wait for the infaller to reach near the surface and get burnt.”

Rather than feeling a burning sensation, or a shattering or crushing sensation, Mathur predicts that an ‘infaller’ would feel as though they were falling through a form of gently curved spacetime called “anti-de Sitter space.”

“This is the idea of ‘complementarity’,” Mathur says, “which the firewall people were trying to shoot down.” Understanding this is key to answering the inevitable question: What happens when you get sucked into a black hole?

fuzzballs black holes

Multiple images of the 'real monster black hole' at the heart of the colliding galaxies Arp 299. At top, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has recorded X-ray data projected out by the system. At middle, the NuSTAR high-energy X-ray data has been overlaid on a visible-light image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The bottom panel shows Hubble's visible-light image alone.

The answer relies on the assumption that, in quantum mechanics, everything can be described by a set of frequencies. “If two systems have the same frequencies, then we cannot tell them apart. For example, if a piano and a keyboard emitted the same frequencies, you could not hear them and tell that they were really very different internally.”

Likewise, a person can be described by a set of frequencies. If that person falls into a black hole, Mathur explains, “he hits the fuzzball and sets the fuzzball into vibrations. But suppose the fuzzball vibrates with the same frequencies. Then the infaller has been absorbed, but in a sense he continues to live on in terms of the vibrations of the fuzzball. Thus he will not feel that he has been absorbed.”

(For a rough, maybe irresponsible, approximation, feel free to just imagine a person going through a black hole and then entering some psychedelic interstellar phantasia from an old Jack Kirby Marvel comic. Let’s say Doctor Strange..ubble's visible-light image alone

Though Mathur’s explanation is satisfying (albeit complicated), it’s unclear whether it will put an end to the black hole paradox problem anytime soon. Neither Adami nor Marolf felt comfortable commenting on the new research from Mathur and his team, each for his own reasons. Warner would not either, but admits he feels very confident that Mathur is on the right track by applying string theory to the internal dynamics of black holes.

String theory has been notoriously airy and abstracted. It has been accused of being non-falsifiable, its adherents like religious zealots in their commitment to a series of mathematical equations that have, thus far, strongly suggested the existence of many dimensions outside the four we all deal with regularly — without a single physical experiment to confirm them.

But if we want to solve the black hole paradox once and for all, we may very well have to take their giant leap of faith.

“If I had to bet one the place where you might get some indication of string theory in the next decade or two,” Warner says, “it might just be in black hole physics.”

NASA/Paul E. Alers, Samir Mathur / Ohio State / Matthew Phelan, NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC, Flickr / US Department of State, Flickr / NASA Goddard Photo and Video, NASA, Flickr / NASA Hubble

The Black Eyed Children, Women in Black, MIB, and more: what do they all have in common? Well, on more than a few occasions the witnesses are in distinctly altered states when something unearthly and unknown enters their environments. We’ll begin with the Black Eyed Children. I have enough cases on file to allow me to conclude that many incidents involving the BEC don’t occur in what we would call a normal state of awareness.

In my forthcoming book, Paranormal Parasites (available in just a few weeks from now), I refer to the case of a man named Martin, who I had the good fortune to meet. As I note in the book: “Martin got the shock of his life when he was confronted by a boy and a girl – both around eleven or twelve years of age and with large, black, eerie-looking eyes. The girl was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black top, while the boy had the almost-ubiquitous black hoodie. Both looked sickly and scrawny and is if they needed a hearty meal in them. Little did Martin know that this was exactly what they were there for…

“…Martin said that when the girl said they were homeless and needed something to eat, it all seemed very much like a ruse – as if they had spoken the words time and time again. It was like a carefully-crafted scheme on their part. Most disturbing of all, for a few moments Martin felt transfixed – almost hypnotized – by those large, black eyes. Indeed, he told me that he could not understand why he did not quickly shut the door at the sight of those terrible eyes. Martin could only say that it was if he was somehow being prevented from shutting the door on the pair. One might be justified in saying Martin had been placed in a state of full-blown mind-control…”

A careful look at the experiences of Albert Bender – the man who largely began the MIB phenomenon – demonstrates that some of his encounters clearly occurred when he was in a state of hypnagogia. Or, sleep paralysis, as it’s also known. In 1956, Gray Barker (writer, publisher, teller of tall tales, and a promoter of often-skewed facts) wrote a book on Bender’s experiences. Its title: They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Six years later, Barker published Bender’s very own book on his confrontations with the Men in Black: Flying Saucers and the Three Men. A strange story, it told of Bender’s alleged encounters with hot, alien space babes, the sinister MIB, and a trip to Antarctica. While Barker was known for bending the truth, he made a statement in 1980 that suggests Barker knew that Bender’s encounters were not just weird, but really weird. He told ufologist Jerry Clark: “If I’d been there in his room while he was in ‘Antarctica,’ maybe I would have seen him lying in his bed in a trance [italics mine].”

Then, there is a certain experience that the late Terence McKenna described. While in the Amazon Jungle in the 1960s, McKenna took a trip of a very weird kind. One of his contacts in the area suggested that he – McKenna – should “watch a portion of the sky where, reportedly, a UFO might appear.” McKenna soon saw a weird-looking cloud appeared on the horizon, and which quickly mutated into a classic 1950s-era Flying Saucer. McKenna later said of the experience: “I recognized this thing. It looked like the end cap of a Hoover vacuum cleaner; exactly the same fake saucer as in George Adamski’s photos. This thing flew right over my head, and it was as phony as a three-dollar bill. I knew it was a fake.”

Micah Hanks says: “Many of the shamanic cultures around the world who use DMT-rich snuffs and teas in their rituals describe entities they meet while taking the stuff. Similarly, test subjects in various DMT studies, including those of Rich Strassman, report meeting similar ‘beings.’ And common to both groups are haunting consistencies between descriptions of these entities. In fact, some believe these beings could even be ‘inter-dimensional ambassadors’ which come to meet pyschonauts in the sub-space realm that lingers between reality and whatever people experiencing a DMT trip tend to end up visiting.”

On top of that, there is the case of Peter Beckman, who had an encounter with two grim-looking MIB – around fifty years ago – while he was on mescalin. In the 1970s Shirely Cromartie, who worked in the Nixon administration, had her very own encounter with a Woman in Black, but when she was clearly not in a normal state of mind and when she had been clandestinely dosed with something by the WIB. You can find the Cromartie story here, and the Beckman one here.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that I have reports on file that involved people who had encounters with the MIB and the BEC, and which had one, almost-identical aspect attached to all of them. It’s this: the supernatural entities appeared to be verysurprised that the witnesses could see them. It was as if being in an altered state gave the people the ability to access a bizarre realm and its equally bizarre creatures; something they would not normally see. And the entities themselves, in some cases, it seems, were not prepared for the face-to-face encounter, either. This has led more than a few people to suggest to me that all of these things chiefly exist in a very strange state of reality to that in which we exist. But, that on occasion, psychedelic drugs, altered states of minds, DMT, the sleep state, and more, may well give us an occasional, amazing insight into a world beyond ours and which is largely inaccessible. But, not always inaccessible…