THE CRYPTIC BLACK HOLE

So there you are, about to leap into a black hole. What could await should — against all odds — you somehow survive? Where would you end up and what tantalizing tales would you be able to regale if you managed to clamber your way back? The simple answer to all of these questions is, as Professor Richard Massey explains, "Who knows?" As a Royal Society research fellow at the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, Massey is fully aware that the paradoxes of black holes run deep. A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole . "Falling through an event horizon is passing beyond the veil — once someone falls past it, nobody could ever send a message back," he said. "They'd be ripped to pieces by the ...