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The Strange Physics- and Singular Sights - Inside Black Holes

That link between black holes and the Big Bang hooks into one of the most pressing mysteries of modern physics: reconciling the laws that govern the large-scale world we inhabit and those governing the invisible, subatomic realm. Planets, stars, and galaxies seem to follow the rules of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity and the curvature of space-time. (According to Einstein, mass bends both space and time, causing objects to fall toward it and creating the phenomenon that we perceive as gravity.) Small-scale objects like atoms and electrons, on the other hand, seem to follow the very different laws of quantum mechanics. The two sets of rules must ultimately mesh, but physicists are still trying to figure out how. For the Big Bang and the black hole, the disconnect is especially obvious because they occupy both the very big and the very small ends of the scale as they evolve. “I was interested in general relativity as a graduate student,” Hamilton says. “This project allowed me to work on general relativity and make movies at the same time.”

Despite the magnitude of the task, Hamilton began modestly. He took the known attributes of black holes and plugged them into a basic computer graphics program. All it involved was applying Einstein’s relativity equations, which describe how light rays would bend as they approach a black hole. Hamilton’s first, simple movies were broad and cartoonish, but they served their purpose: showing how different kinds of black holes might look as you approached them from the outside and then ventured in. In one animation, the observer flew by a star system and plunged across a black hole’s event horizon, represented by a spherical red grid. Another movie offered a glimpse of an alternate universe, shown in pink, before the observer met his end at the singularity. In a third, the event horizon split in two as the observer entered the interior—a bizarre effect (later validated by Hamilton) that initially convinced some critics that these simulations must be flawed