Andrew Strominger

Well, if space gets very curved, you get crushed.

You know, your body gets ripped apart because the forces are different on different parts of your body.

Sure.

Okay, so that would be... But it can be less curved so that the curvature is very noticeable, but you're not ripped apart.

Well, this paper is exploring a new idea.

It's not making...

It's not making a new discovery, so to speak.

It's exploring an idea and the ins and outs of it and what might work.

And what might not.

And this photon ring, somehow everybody always thought that the holographic plate sat at the horizon of the black hole.

Right.

And that the quantum system that describes the black hole is inside the horizons.

And in fact, we think it's plausible, and we give some evidence in some soluble examples, in this case, in an example in one lower dimension where we can handle the equations better, that the quantum system that describes the black hole

should correspond to a region of space-time which includes the photon ring.

So it's bigger.

I mean, we didn't prove this.

We put it out there.

It hadn't really been considered previously.

We put it out there, and it does seem more plausible than the idea that it sits literally at the horizon.

And it is a big, outstanding problem of how you have a holographic reconstruction of black holes like M87.