James' World 2

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Black holes are great at sucking up matter. So great, in fact, that not even light can escape their grasp (hence the name).

But given their talent for consumption, why don’t black holes just keep expanding and expanding and simply swallow the Universe? In 2018, one of the world’s top physicists came up with a dazzling explanation.

Conveniently, the idea could also unite the two biggest theories in all of physics.

The researcher behind this explanation is none other than Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind, also known as one of the fathers of string theory.

He gave his two cents on the paradox in a series of papers, which basically suggest that black holes expand by increasing in complexity inwardly – a feature we just don’t see connected while watching from afar.

In other words, they expand in, not out. 

Weirder still, this hypothesis might have a parallel in the expansion of our own Universe, which also seems to be growing in a counterintuitive way.

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Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor drove much of United States foreign policy in the middle of the 20th century. But it had the wrong name. From a physical point of view, it should have been called the “sandpile theory.”

Real-world political phase transitions tend to happen not in neat sequences, but in sudden coordinated fits, like the Arab Spring, or the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. These reflect quiet periods punctuated by crises—like a sandpile. You can add grains of sand to the top of a sandpile for a while, to no apparent effect. Then, all at once, an avalanche sweeps sand down from the top in an irregular pattern, possibly setting off little sub-avalanches as it goes.

This analogy doesn’t necessarily get us anywhere. After all, real sand is hard to analyze, just like real politics. But here’s the miracle. A kind of abstraction of a sandheap, known as the “abelian sandpile model,” created by physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Wiesenfeld in 1987, seems to capture some of the rich, chaotic features of real sandpiles, not to mention other complex systems from biology, physics, and social science—while remaining simple enough to study mathematically.

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Numbers Math

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The exhibition “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting” collects objects, such as these tools from Anvers Island, Antarctica, to remember “places that may disappear because of the combined physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change.”Photograph by Mary Lou Saxon / Courtesy A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting

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It’s May 1964 and, on a low hillside in New Jersey, the physicists Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Allan Penzias are listening in on the Universe. They are standing beneath what looks like a gargantuan ear trumpet attached to a garden shed: the Holmdel Horn Antenna, built by Bell Laboratories to investigate microwaves as an alternative to radio waves for telecommunication. When interest in microwave communication waned, Bell lent out the Holmdel horn to interested scientists.

Penzias and Wilson were interested. Both aged around 30, they planned to map the sky with microwaves. But they were baffled: when they pointed the horn at a dark region beyond the galaxy and only sparsely populated with stars, instead of the silence they expected, they detected a kind of background hiss – a hiss that filled the entire sky.

Meanwhile, the physicist Robert H Dicke was working on a related puzzle. Two decades earlier, Dicke had invented the microwave detector. Now he and his lab were trying to develop sensitive instruments to test the cosmological predictions that emerged from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, particularly how it related to Edwin Hubble’s astonishing discovery that the Universe is expanding. The reigning, steady-state theory claimed that the Universe had always been expanding, balanced by a continuous creation of new matter. The rival theorists, including Dicke, took expansion at its face value, running it backwards in time to propose that, about 14 billion years ago, the Universe burst into existence in a cataclysmic explosion from a very tiny point.

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The Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey, United States. Courtesy Wikipedia

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