If you spent all your ordered thoughts contemplating the depths of black holes like University of Utah physics professor Lior Burko does, your office might look like his -- a chaos of papers, scholarly books, and mathematical equations scrawled on a chalkboard. Your gaze might be as concentrated and your manner as unhurried. Burko is a patient man who admits it could take a thousand years or even longer before anybody could test his theories.

Every day Burko wraps his mind around some of the most cataclysmic forces in the universe, where time and space are infinitely bent and where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape. Conventional wisdom has regarded black holes as unavoidably destructive; if a person were caught there,  they’d be pulled like a strand of spaghetti: “infinitely stretched and infinitely squeezed,” like dough in a hand-cranked pasta press, until the molecular, atomic and nuclear bonds that held them together would shatter (a process physicists colloquially call ‘spaghettification’).

But Burko’s research places the prevailing theories about the inevitable destructiveness of black holes into question. He hypothesizes that the singularities (cores) inside black holes may have weak sectors, which would make hyperspace travel not an impossibility at some future date–maybe 1,000 years from now. Burko says claims that travel through black holes is impossible are not supported by conclusive evidence.

Burko grew up in Haifa, Israel, a coastal town along the slopes of Mount Carmel, the biblical site of Elijah’s challenge to the gods of Baal worshippers and a destination of religious pilgrimages for centuries. His father, who owns a lumber import and distribution business, was a bit disappointed by his son’s choice to study physics. His mother was taken aback as well. “My mother said, ‘Physics? Are you out of your mind? Why don’t you try something like law school?’” Lior first became interested in physics in high school when he read Ne'eman’s Particle Hunters and a biography of Albert Einstein. Intrigued by Einstein’s Unified Field Theory (that Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life trying to prove), Burko envisioned himself being able to extend Einstein’s work.  “I was very naïve in high school,” says Burko. “I thought that I could pick up on the work that he left.”

Burko may not have picked up on Einstein’s unfinished work, but he decided not to stray too far.  He attended graduate school at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he considers himself fortunate to have had Amos Ori as his Ph.D. advisor. Ori gave Burko a choice to help him on a few projects, including one focused on time travel and another on the internal structures of black holes. Burko chose the latter, and together they created a simple model of physical objects falling inside a black hole, and interacting with the radiation fields inside. Following that initial project, they worked together on other projects related to black holes.

Burko enjoys studying black holes, what Nobel Prize-winning physicist S. Chandrasekhar characterized as "the most perfect objects," because they are made only of the fabric of space and time. Exploring the physicality of black holes offers Burko the allure of discovering unexplored regions. To him, black holes are the “the ultimate ‘terra incognita,’” a phrase cartographers have historically used to designate uncharted territory.

“During the Age of Discovery, the phrases ‘terra incognita’ and ‘here be dragons’ used to describe uncharted lands,” says Burko. “The interior of black holes is the ultimate uncharted region of space, and therefore also the most mysterious and interesting.” Burko admits, however, that if the technology existed today to transport someone to a black hole, he wouldn’t be first in line for the trip. One of the problems is getting out of the black hole once you’re in. “There’s no way of getting back to the mother ship,” says Burko.

Gravitational forces inside black holes are believed to be much stronger than they are here on earth. Since gravity’s effect on earth is not that strong, and the distance between our heads and our feet is so small, we don’t notice the difference. But deep inside black holes, the force of gravity is so powerful that the difference between gravity’s pull on your head and your feet would stretch and compress you like a strand of spaghetti. Unless, that is, if you were to happen upon a black hole at a time and place when its singularity is weak, in which case you might be able to pass through unscathed.

Burko has theorized that the singularity of some black holes has a hybrid structure, which evolves from weak to strong forces, making them potentially traversable. Burko explains it in this way: “A useful mental picture is that of a spherical ball, whose surface is singular, in some sense like a shock wave or an ultrasonic boom. The singular ball moves with the speed of light, and while doing so it shrinks. As long as the ball has finite volume, the singularity on its surface is weak. At some point it pinches off and gets to zero volume, and from that point on the singularity is strong. If an astronaut were to fall inside the black hole, she could intercept that moving ball while it still has a finite volume and get to the singularity when it is weak.”

A singularity is the result of an infinite concentration of energy density at the center of the black hole where space and time curve infinitely and even light waves become shorter – some dangerously short, turning into fatal gamma or x-rays. “We cannot rule out the possibility that a spaceship could traverse the weak sector of the singularity peacefully,” says Burko. “If that happens, the spaceship may find inside the black hole a “wormhole” structure – a type of tunnel that may connect it to another universe or even a remote place in time and space in our own universe.”

Safe passage would then be only “ a question of engineering,” says Burko, explaining that future space ships may be engineered to withstand the journey.

Burko also elucidates some of the strange things that may happen inside a black hole. Imagine that an astronaut at some millennial year decides to jump into the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which has a mass two million times that of the sun. (It takes light about 30,000 years to get here from there.) What will the astronaut see and learn about our universe as she approaches the black hole? Burko believes the entire “future history” of the universe will flash before her eyes.

“When the astronaut gets closer to a certain mathematical surface inside the black hole, she sees the radiation fields coming from the remote future of the external universe,” he says. “Even though it will take the astronaut only a finite (and small) lapse of time to get to that mathematical surface inside a black hole, she will see radiation emitted from the external universe at very late times, in fact, the infinite future of the universe.”

Along with his research, Burko teaches a course at the U. called Elementary Physics, a course he overhauled to teach as a liberal arts class to help non-physics majors learn the difference between science and non-science. He hopes the course will help expand students’ ideas of a modern democratic society. “I plan to talk about energy and rational and effective use of the limited energy resources that we have,” says Burko. He also wants to show students how physics relates with other aspects of human civilization, such as philosophy, literature, art and even political science. “Very few know that the mental picture that John Adams had when he thought of a political system of checks and balances is that of a mechanical system in equilibrium. In fact, the founding fathers were strongly influenced by the Newtonian viewpoint. Physics has more impact on our society than we usually think.”