According to UC Berkeley physicist Peter Hintz, if a traveler were to fall into a “relatively benign” black hole, he might survive.
This is thanks to a theoretical phenomenon called cosmic censorship. This theory suggests that inside black holes there is a barrier and, after crossing it, the laws of the universe are cancelled.
That barrier would be deeper than the event horizon (or point of no return), the boundary around the black hole that doesn’t allow light or radiation to escape.
Beyond that point, time and space exist as an infinite instant.
According to the laws of physics, the mass of a star that has collapsed and gives rise to black holes is compressed into an infinitely small point, called a singularity. Hintz believes that the singularity and the event horizon can coexist.
The simultaneous existence of these two effects could create a zone beyond the event horizon, where objects are disconnected from their pasts and have no particular future.
This means that if someone survived the experience of a black hole, they could have their past erased and live an infinite number of futures.
Hintz and his colleagues are not suggesting that a physicist dive into a black hole and see what happens. “This is a question that can only be studied mathematically, but it has physical and almost philosophical implications,” he says.
The scientist clarifies that all these possibilities are only theoretical.
