Today, we’re sitting down with theoretical physicist Dr. Greg Winters to talk dark matter, the nature of the universe, and time travel.

Mad Matter: Dr. Winters, you are one of the world’s leading physicists, doing groundbreaking research on the very nature of the universe. NASA calls you when they’re stumped. People say there might be a Nobel Prize sitting in your office someday. Yet you’ve taken a sabbatical. Why?

Dr. Winters: My research on dark matter and dark energy—

Mad Matter: For our readers, I’ll just interject here: This is the stuff that makes up ninety-five percent of the universe, but we have no idea what it is.

Dr. Winters: Correct. My work in this field has inadvertently created a, shall we say, event horizon of sorts in my life—not to get all heavy on you with general relativity and spacetime.

Mad Matter: [Laughs] Give us your best explanation of what an event horizon is.

Dr. Winters: An event horizon is the point of no return. It’s a terrain in spacetime that’s created when the gravitational pull of a massive object is so great that escaping it is impossible. Imagine a huge magnet, pointed at you, and you’re covered in metal. There’s no avoiding its pull. When that massive object is coming your way, it’s creating that point of no return. You can’t escape the object. You have to face it.

Event horizons are mostly discussed in relation to black holes, but they’re a great metaphor for life, too.

Mad Matter: How so?

Dr. Winters: Well, all of us, at one time or another, are going to have something happen that creates an event horizon—a point of no return. The first thing is to accept that we can’t escape it, and so we need to face it head-on. Next, we need to look for the potential this event horizon presents us with.

Mad Matter: What is the potential of an event horizon?

Dr. Winters: Theoretically, if you could actually make it across the event horizon, you could see the entire history of the universe playing out before you. You see Napoleon on his horse and your ancestors in the fields and the suffragettes marching in the streets of New York City, and you see your children sleeping in bed in the other room and you see the cancer diagnosis you will get five years from now. You see every bit of it. All of time is happening at the same moment all around you.

Now, here on Earth, we can’t get ourselves to actual event horizons that let us see the future and thus help us make better choices in the present. We can’t time travel. Yet.

Mad Matter: So how does it help us—knowing event horizons are out there, and that there’s potential to see all of time playing out at once?

Dr. Winters: For me, it makes life on Earth a little more bearable: There’s comfort in knowing that whatever is going to happen is already happening right now. In spacetime. It takes the pressure off. The deaths and births and screwups and victories—it’s already playing out. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.