Andrew Strominger

And here's how it works.

A black hole is a mirror.

And the way it's a mirror is if light, a photon, bounces off your face towards the black hole, and it goes straight to the black hole, just falls in, you never see it again.

But if it just misses the black hole, it'll swing around the back and come back to you.

And you see yourself from the photon that went around the back of the black hole.

But not only can that happen, the black hole, the photon can swing around twice and come back.

So you actually see an infinite number of copies of yourself.

With a little bit of a delay, right.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And in fact, one of my students has made a really awesome computer animation of this, which I'm going to show at a public lecture in a couple of weeks where the audience will see infinitely many copies of themselves.

Swirling around the black hole.

So a black hole is like a hall of mirrors, like in a department store where you go and there's the three mirrors and you see infinitely many copies of yourself.

Yeah.

Think of the black hole as the mirror.

And you go in there with your clothes.

If you want to know about your clothes, you just look at the direct image.

You're not learning anything about the configuration of mirrors.

But the relation of the image you see in front of you to the one you see at the side and the next one and so on depends only on the mirrors.

It doesn't matter what clothes you're wearing.