Will We Ever Understand Black Holes?

So, what would it feel like to fall into a black hole? From a report: 'Well, at the moment you crossed the horizon, you wouldn't feel anything -- there would be nothing dramatic,' Peter Galison, co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, says over the phone. Huh. Doesn't sound too bad. 'But inevitably, you would be pulled towards the centre,' he continues. 'There's no going back; everything that falls into a black hole just keeps falling; there's no resisting that pull and things don't end well.'

Ah. Go on. 'Physicists have an expression called 'spaghettification' because if you were falling in feet first, your feet would be more attracted towards the centre than your head, and your sides would be pushed towards your middle and this process would extend and compress you.' Right. So, terrifying, then. Especially when Galison adds with cosmic understatement: 'In the long term that's not a good survival event.' We are talking about his documentary film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, four years in the making and available on Netflix from 1 June, which follows two scientific collaborations to understand the most mysterious objects in the universe. Among the highlights is being a fly on the wall as the late Stephen Hawking tries to figure them out.

It is Hawking's voice, that instantly recognisable computer speech synthesiser, that opens the film: 'A black hole is stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. It's a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Once you are over the edge, there's no way back.' City-sized black holes form when certain stars run out of fuel to burn and collapse under the force of their own gravity. Supermassive black holes -- millions or billions of times bigger than our sun -- are found at the centre of almost every galaxy including our own, the Milky Way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.