Physicist Bars Revives Two-Time Physics for Black Holes — SkimNews
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- Itzhak Bars at the University of Southern California first unveiled "two-time physics" in 1998, proposing a universe with 4 dimensions of space and 2 of time.
- Bars's framework treats position and momentum as interchangeable descriptions of reality, inspired by quantum mechanics' uncertainty principle, and he says this avoids the causality violations that plague naïve two-time theories.
- Working with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton and Neil Turok at the University of Edinburgh in 2013, Bars found that during a "big crunch," particle masses dwindle toward zero and gravity becomes repulsive, letting the universe pass through the singularity.
- In 2025, Bars applied the framework to black holes, arguing that information from falling matter passes through the singularity into a region where gravity flips to repulsive — rather than being destroyed as Hawking's 1970s radiation result implied.
- Theorist Federica Muscolino at the University of Milan-Bicocca called the paper's topic and techniques "highly innovative" and said it resolves both the singularity problem and the black hole information paradox.
- Two-time physics predicts that supposedly fixed constants like particle masses could vary in extreme environments — a testable prediction astronomers could search for in observations of cosmic history.
Why it matters: For 50 years, the black hole information paradox has pitted quantum mechanics against Hawking's 1970s result suggesting information is destroyed. Bars's framework offers a concrete, testable alternative to mainstream approaches like string theory, with the specific prediction that supposedly fixed constants like particle masses could shift in extreme environments — something astronomers could actually search for.
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