A few physicists put up the idea that maybe we are inside a black hole, which is as weird as black holes. These mysterious objects are a puzzle to the physics we know and hence inspire scientists to consider even more bizarre hypotheses. One such is the holographic universe, which posits that three-dimensional perception (which involves time) is a projection from data encoded on the boundary of our universe— a two-dimensional space plus time reality.
Taking the idea even further, some researchers have put forward a rather speculative idea that probably what we call our universe is just the inside of a black hole which is in another bigger universe. When massive stars die and their mass collapses, they create areas where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape it not even light. While information about them has increased manifold after this time, black holes raise thorny contradictions especially in connection with thermodynamics.
Jean-Pierre Luminet, an astronomer, draws attention to the black hole information conundrum. The only attributes of matter that remain after it passes through a black hole’s event horizon are its mass, angular momentum, and electric charge, according to classical general relativity. On the other hand, Stephen Hawking proved that black holes evaporate and release radiation, which is now known as Hawking radiation. The problem is that information is lost throughout this process, which goes against the fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics—that information cannot be destroyed.
Scientists used string theory to solve this dilemma, discovering that a black hole’s entropy is determined by the surface area of its event horizon rather than its volume. This gave rise to the hypothesis that data ingested by a black hole may be stored in two dimensions on its surface, much like a hologram.
This idea, while still theoretical, contradicts how we often think about space-time. It also presents the intriguing hypothesis that all we perceive is a projection from a two-dimensional boundary, and that the universe in which we exist might be a black hole. Even though it’s theoretical, this hypothesis nevertheless fascinates and motivates physics research.