These black holes may erase your past and offer an unlimited future

These black holes may erase your past and offer an unlimited future

CHRISTIAN COTRONEO

February 22, 2018, 4: 33 p. m.

Objects — like humans, for instance — may be able to pass a black hole's event horizon safely. (Photo: oorka/Shutterstock)

Got a checkered past? Looking to put a little heartbreak behind you? Howabout a futureofinfinitepossibility?

According to a new study, it may be time to embrace the eternal darkness of the black hole mind.

Theoretically — and that’s a very big theoretical — the study suggests there may be a kind of black hole that not only erases history, but creates countless future possibilities.

For the study, mathematicians looked at what would happen to an object as it passes through the event horizon, the go-back-now-or-never-return point of an electrically charged black hole.

The findings could upend Albert Einstein’s thoroughly established theory of general relativity — namely that the laws of physics remain the same for all observers. That makes it possible to determine the past and future of an object based on its location and velocity at a specific time.

The space-time-bending properties of black holes, on the other hand, complicate things. Beyond a black hole’s event horizon, there’s another surface called the Cauchy horizon that theoretically slows anyone or anything in its grasp to an infinite crawl. Imagine moving in hyper-slow motion toward a black hole’s center for all eternity.

No past. No future. No Einstein.

Of course, we wouldn’t be able to experience that feeling because a black hole’s infinite density — its singularity — would have stretched our bodies out to just a long string of atoms.

If the Berkeley mathematical model holds true, a very large electrically charged black hole would actually allow an object to pass safely through the Cauchy horizon. That object would reach a place on the other side completely isolated from the rest of space and time, and it would have neither a past nor future.

Researchers suggest an electrically charged black hole could lie outside of our universally accepted laws of physics. (Photo: Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock)

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