Scientists Are Mapping the Bizarre, Chaotic Spacetime Inside Black Holes

Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge.

In the late 1960s , some physicists speculated that singularities might be surrounded by a region of churning chaos.

The result was not a smooth stretching of space and time inside, but a sea of time stretching and compressing in multiple directions.

General relativity holds that two regions of space can be disconnected, meaning that nothing that takes place in one region can have any possible effect on the other.

But regions of spacetime can also become disconnected, or decoupled, in the presence of strong gravitational fields such as those found in and around a black hole.

The BKL group argued that, as you get close to a singularity, the strong gravity causes every point in space to decouple.

One can use AdS /CFT to pose a complex problem on one side, translate it into a simpler form on the other, and translate a solution back.

The correspondence is an extremely powerful tool for physicists seeking to understand gravitational phenomena such as black holes.

After Hartnoll first found BKL-like chaos in black holes, others have been trying to figure out what, exactly, causes it to arise.