How do you study the inside of a black hole, something that, by definition, can't be seen?
If there’s one thing everyone knows about black holes, it’s that nothing escapes their grasp – not even light. Even if you could send a probe into one, it’d never be able to return and report back on what it found.
Anything that crosses the event horizon – the external boundary of a black hole – vanishes, lost forever behind a high-gravity veil.
The problem is that physics has two ways to describe how the Universe works: Einstein’s theory of gravity, otherwise known as General Relativity (GR), and quantum mechanics.
GR explains things that are big, such as the movements of stars and galaxies. Quantum mechanics, meanwhile, explains things that are small, like the behaviour of atoms and subatomic particles.
Both appear to be true, providing us with useful and predictive models of the Universe, but the two theories, as we currently understand them, are incompatible. Gravity, as described by GR, breaks down at the quantum level, and quantum mechanics simply doesn’t work with GR.
So far, no one has figured out a way to unite them.
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