The fuzzball googly

Nearly 30 years ago, Samir Mathur began grappling with a paradox at the heart of black hole physics: how could the universe destroy information when its laws appeared to forbid it? The paradox is tied to the event horizon – an invisible boundary around a black hole beyond which gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Anything crossing it cannot return, and is pulled inward towards a singularity where the known laws of physics break down. This no-exit feature, which appears to contradict quantum mechanics – another foundational pillar of physics – has troubled physicists for more than 50 years.

Mathur, Professor of Physics at The Ohio State University, approached the problem by reimagining what a black hole might be. He imagined a compact and tangled object woven from tiny vibrating strings – ultra-thin filaments hypothesised in mathematical theories that seek to unify gravity with other fundamental forces. If they exist, strings operate at scales far smaller than those accessible to any current experiments. In Mathur's proposal, what appears to be a black hole from afar is, up close, a dense sphere of strings: a "fuzzball".