The hidden pockets of the universe where the future can cause the past
Beyond a black hole’s event horizon, there is an even stranger boundary Zita/Shutterstock You’re falling into a black hole. Somehow, you’ve managed to protect yourself from the spaghettification that’s happening to every object around you as the black hole’s powerful gravity pulls on the near end of each object more than the far end, stretching everything into noodles before shredding it to pieces. Maybe you’ve got some sort of high-tech compression suit holding you together; congratulations on your invention. As you pass the event horizon, the point of no return, all you see is blackness punctuated by streaks of light falling towards the singularity at the heart of the cosmic behemoth. Your impossible suit also protects you from those streaks, which would otherwise be ripping through your molecules at near-light speed. And then you pass a second, lesser-known horizon, and time and space switch places. This second boundary is called the Cauchy horizon; if they exist within black holes, their insides are the strangest places in the universe. All of classical physics comes from, relies …




