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In 1967, the physicist John Wheeler was giving a lecture about a mysterious and startling phenomenon in deep space that the field was just beginning to understand. But it didn’t have a great name to match. Wheeler and his audience were equally tired of hearing “gravitationally completely collapsed object” over and over, so someone threw out an idea for a different name. A few weeks later, at another conference, Wheeler debuted the suggestion: black hole. And it’s perfect, isn’t it? What else would you call a dark abyss that swallows light and matter and doesn’t let go?

Decades later, black holes—invisible, impenetrable, and many light-years away—are more familiar to us than ever before. We know that supermassive versions sit at the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way. In 2019, we even got pictures that show a black hole as an imposing shadow against the glow of cosmic material. Scientists have detected the gravitational ripples that result when black holes smash into each other; the entire cosmos, we recently learned, might be humming with the force of such collisions. The list goes on.

But the big mystery still remains: We don’t know what lies at the center of a black hole, beyond the boundary where matter winks out of view forever. “The question is definitely answerable in that someone could fall inside the black hole and find out the answer,” Eliot Quataert, a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton, told me in an email. “The problem is they couldn’t convey that answer to someone outside the black hole—because nothing can get out.”

Because such hands-on observation is impossible, scientists must approach the subject theoretically. The effort involves mind-bending physics calculations, endless thought experiments, and seriously entertaining the possibility that the universe is delightfully weirder than we can imagine. It also requires accepting that we’ll never truly know for sure what’s inside a black hole.

For us Earthlings, a bottomless pit more massive than the sun might be difficult to fathom. “Black holes are not solid objects, like planets or asteroids,” Shane Larson, a physics professor at Northwestern University, told me. They’re more like regions in space, seemingly empty spots made noticeable by the stars orbiting wildly around them. “It’s kind of like an open window,” Larson said: an invisible line that separates exterior from interior.

[Read: Behold, the bottomless pit holding everything together]

To understand why black holes scramble our understanding of cosmic forces, we need to think about their structure. If a black hole were a Ferrero Rocher chocolate ball, the first layer of chocolate and crushed hazelnuts would be the region just outside the event horizon, where gravity is still weak enough that a nearby star could safely whizz by and not fall in. Next up is a layer of crispy wafer; this is the event horizon, the point of no return. Under this layer lies smooth chocolate filling, through which trapped cosmic material is sucked toward the center. And then there’s the heart of the Ferrero candy, the whole, roasted hazelnut. This is the singularity, a tiny, concentrated point of infinite density.

Physicists believe they understand what the space beyond the event horizon—nearly all the way through the chocolate filling—should look like, based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity. If an astronaut were to fall into a black hole, she would descend, and as she went deeper, she would experience the very fabric of space-time warping all around her. The 1915 theory describes well what must occur in such an extreme environment, where gravity overwhelms all other forces in the universe. The trouble starts farther in, closer to the singularity, where “the laws of physics as we currently understand them break down,” Larson said.

Deep inside a black hole, general relativity isn’t enough to explain what’s happening; you also need a different kind of physics, quantum mechanics, which deals with the tiniest particles of the universe, atoms and their even-smaller components. “When collapsing all matter down to a point,” as a black hole does, “the size gets small enough that quantum effects become important,” James Miller-Jones, an astronomer at Curtin University, in Australia, told me in an email. Unfortunately, general relativity and quantum mechanics do not get along.

[Read: A plot twist in the Milky Way]

According to the principles of general relativity, once stuff goes into a black hole, it’s lost for good. You can determine some fundamental properties of the black hole, such as its mass, but not its constituent parts. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes actually evaporate very slowly, emitting radiation from just outside the event horizon. This development should have been thrilling for quantum mechanics, which dictates that information can’t be destroyed. If someone took apart a completed puzzle and scattered it around your garden, you could collect the pieces and put them together again, Nicholas Warner, a physics and astronomy professor at the University of Southern California, told me. It would take some time and effort without a picture to guide you, but quantum theory says you could do it. But the particles wafting off black holes seem entirely devoid of information about the contents of their interior—a clear-cut violation of that principle. It’s as if someone had run all those puzzle pieces through a washing machine, and “they all become this gloopy, gray mess,” Warner said.

Theoretical physicists around the world are trying to reconcile the mismatch between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Warner is a member of the camp that believes that Einstein’s theory—the very principles that predicted the existence of black holes before astronomers found evidence of them—is incomplete. Other experts feel the same but say Einstein isn’t the only one to blame. “Maybe you have to change quantum mechanics too,” Daniel Harlow, a physicist at MIT, told me. Harlow and his colleagues have posited that the radiation that Hawking discovered is indeed encoded with information from the depths, and our understanding of quantum mechanics isn’t good enough yet to unscramble it.

Everyone is searching for a theory of quantum gravity that avoids any contradiction. “We don’t have one of those,” Charles Hailey, an astrophysicist at Columbia University, told me. “Not even close.” But some physicists I spoke with said the field could crack it within decades, certainly in this century. Scientists would finally know—but only in the theoretical sense, of course.

That’s the thing about black holes. We can get only so close to the truth, only experience certain kinds of knowing. Even the powerful telescopes that have shown us sparkling galaxies nearly all the way back to the Big Bang can’t help us here. “Observationally, we’re almost certainly not going to learn anything about the inside of black holes in this century,” Carl Rodriguez, a physics professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me in an email. The best we can do is to study some effects of black holes. Maya Fishbach, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto, thinks we’ll learn more by studying the invisible gravitational waves that fan out when two black holes collide and merge into one. Those waves carry with them information about the newly formed black hole, which vibrates in the aftermath of its creation like a bell. “Just like listening to a ringing bell can tell us what the bell is made of, listening to the black hole [ringing] can tell us what the black hole is made of,” Fishbach told me.

[Read: Gravitational waves keep rolling past Earth]

But the purest form of discovery will always remain out of reach. “If ‘know’ means a student could take a field trip, observe directly with their own senses, then come back and write a class report about what they observed, then we will never know what is inside,” Larson said. Perhaps that’s not the worst thing. “If it were easy to encounter situations like that”—environments with extreme, drag-you-into-the-abyss gravity—”it would probably be bad for us,” Harlow said. Safer to study black holes from afar, in our quiet cosmic neighborhood, where gravity is far weaker and we overcome it each day, simply by pulling back the covers and getting out of bed in the morning.

When it gets hot enough, as it has across the South in recent weeks, barefoot toddlers suffer second-degree burns from stepping onto concrete. People who fall on the blistering pavement wind up with skin grafts. Kids stay inside all day, “trying to survive.” Windshield wipers glue themselves in place, and the ocean transfers heat back into your body. One electric blackout could bake thousands to death inside their homes.

You would think people would flee such a hellscape expeditiously. But as record-breaking heat fries the Sun Belt, the region’s popularity only grows. The numbers, laid out recently in The Economist, are striking: 12 of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in the Sun Belt. Of the top 50 zip codes that saw the largest increases in new residents since the start of the pandemic, 86 percent were in blazing-hot Texas, Florida, and Arizona.

To be sure, during the pandemic people also moved to a few relatively cool cities in Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. But hot places overwhelmingly dominate nearly every ranking of population growth and migration: The 50 counties with the greatest extreme-heat risk grew by nearly 5 percent from 2016 to 2020 due to migration, according to Redfin data. Meanwhile, the 50 counties with the lowest heat risk saw their population decrease from migration by 1.4 percent in the same time period. Those hot counties were led by Texas’s Williamson County, near Austin, whose population grew by 16 percent from inbound migration, and where 100 percent of homes have a “high heat risk.”

[Read: The problem with ‘Why do people still live in Phoenix?’]

The South may be approaching the approximate ambient temperature of Venus, but that’s no deterrent. People keep wanting to move there. (I count myself among these people, as someone who has dedicated the past year of my life to finding a house in Florida.) This unstoppable appeal of Sun Belt cities rests on three factors: These places tend to have less expensive housing, lots of jobs, and warm winters. None of these is sufficient to attract people in large numbers, but together they seem to generate an irresistible force, sucking up disaffected northerners and Californians like a fiery tornado.

Cheap housing

These days, you don’t have to wonder how the other half lives. You can open up Redfin and see how much house you can get in Dallas for less than your New York rent. The median home price in Los Angeles is $975,000. The median home price in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler is $520,000. Once you have this knowledge, it can be hard to evict it from your mind. What would you do with an extra half a million dollars?

The one thing every sunny, growing city has in common is affordable housing. This explains why Los Angeles, with its unimpeachable weather, is losing residents (including to Phoenix). It’s “vastly easier to mass produce housing in the suburbs of Phoenix or the suburbs of Houston than it is anyplace in coastal California or the Northeast,” says Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard. Cities in the Northeast and West tend to make it harder to get construction permits, and they have zoning requirements that make building affordable housing in desirable areas difficult. Plus, it’s just easier to build on an immense, unending desert than around the mountains of California or in old cities like Boston. In a study in 2007, Glaeser found that in the 1970s and ’80s, housing supply increased by 20 percent more in the South than elsewhere in the country.

In fact, many people seem to end up in the South because they aim for the perfect climate of California, quickly realize they can’t afford it, and settle for a similarly warm, cheaper place, like Phoenix or Austin. Just ask Elon Musk.

A “business-friendly” environment

Not all hot, affordable places are created equal. Austin became a pandemic boom town, but Midland, a West Texas city that’s just as warm and even less expensive, did not. This is where a complex mix of economic growth, human capital, and a certain yuppie je ne sais quoi come into play.

The Sun Belt cities that have soared are mostly in states with low taxes, which helps attract businesses. But many are also home to prominent universities that churn out highly educated workers. They’ve successfully created “agglomeration economies” of lots of similar types of companies in close proximity. Austin has the University of Texas, an Apple campus, and throngs of upwardly mobile Californians and New Yorkers who have fled high house prices. Midland, well, does not.

Austin began its strategy of luring tech workers as early as the 1970s and ’80s, when UT’s then business-school dean, George Kozmetsky, recruited computing companies to the area and launched incubators to nurture local talent (one of his mentees was a UT student named Michael Dell). Companies tend to cluster near other, similar companies—a phenomenon that explains Silicon Valley in California, Kendall Square in Cambridge, and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. Knowledge workers like to be near people who can provide them with mentorship and job leads. You might not want to stay at your job forever, so it’s nice to have other companies to jump to. Businesses and educated workers tend to attract each other, and attract more businesses, creating a virtuous circle. In the first year of the pandemic, Austin had the highest inflow of tech workers of any major city.

[Read: When will the Southwest become unlivable?]

Many of the booming Sun Belt cities also possess the seeds of a hip Millennial lifestyle: Live music, outdoor recreation, and interesting bars and restaurants. The newcomers demand even more microbreweries and tapas places, which then sprout up and attract more newcomers. “When the people come, they in turn change the place,” says Cullum Clark, the director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. “The place becomes bigger; it becomes richer; it becomes more cosmopolitan.” And expat Californians tend to like that.

Warm winters

Walter Bimson, the chair of Valley National Bank and a mid-century booster of Phoenix, once explained that people would surely move to the desert city, because they “want to flee from shoveling coal and from shoveling snow.”

His hunch—that people love sun—has persisted as a lay explanation for Sun Belt migration, but polling on the significance of weather to people’s moving decisions is sparse. Weather often gets wrapped into a nebulous factor called “amenities” or “quality of life,” which can also include the local schools and crime rates. When asked, many people name better weather as a reason for their move, but not the reason. In 2018 survey data shared with me by the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida, the top reasons people gave for moving to Florida were to be closer to family (37 percent), to start a new job (22 percent), and then the climate or weather (14 percent.) A 2014 Gallup poll found that weather was a prominent reason for those seeking to leave Illinois, Maryland, and Idaho, but it wasn’t the top reason for movers from any state. People who moved during the pandemic were likely to cite financial reasons or COVID risk as their motivations.

Still, it would be weird to ignore the sun in Sun Belt. This is something that all the experts I spoke with eventually conceded—that weather is hard to find in the data behind the Sun Belt’s rise, but it’s also hard to explain away. “No variable better predicts metropolitan-area growth over the last 120 years than January temperature,” Glaeser says. “Everybody likes playing golf in the winter,” says Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley. “People really don’t like cold winters,” says Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. People might not always admit it, but they appear to like warm weather.

Warm winters seem to act as an accelerant on cheap housing and plentiful jobs. People will vaguely consider a place with lots of new businesses and $300,000 homes, but once they see a few hundred Instagram posts of 70-degree February days, they call the moving company. “I think it’s word of mouth. It’s Instagram. A place gets buzz,” says the University of Toronto professor (and Atlantic contributor) Richard Florida. “‘My friends are there. It’s fun. They’re going out to restaurants; they’re going to the beach; winter doesn’t look cold.’” If you can work remotely, why not?

Chambers of commerce, real-estate agents, and industries that attract workers to warm-weather states tend to play up the “golf in the winter” element and play down the “lava-hot July.” “January, February, and March are the three reasons why people were attracted” to the Sun Belt, says Andrew Ross, a professor at NYU who has written several books about Sun Belt cities. “Housing-industry developers, real-estate brokers, they don’t talk about the summers. They talk about January, February, and March.”

A Sun Belt tipping point?

That said, all of these new Arizonans and Texans might leave if their cities continue heating and also escape the realm of affordability. There’s already an exodus afoot from Miami, for instance. The conservative governors of some Sun Belt states likely don’t appeal to the creative, liberal types who are drawn to cities. “Let’s you’re a gay designer who moved to Miami. Now you look up and you see Ron DeSantis,” Richard Florida says. “And you go, What the fuck am I doing here?”

[Read: Summer in the South is becoming unbearable]

Florida thinks the next great migration, for both climate and affordability reasons, will be north. Midwestern towns that can offer good amenities without scorching summers, such as Madison or Pittsburgh, are poised to offer a Sun Belt alternative. The Midwest currently has the most worker-relocation incentive programs, which pay remote workers to move to an underpopulated city. (Indiana alone has 16.) Or people might migrate to slightly cooler parts of warm states, choosing Flagstaff over Phoenix. (This is already happening, to some extent.)

For now, though, climatologists’ dire predictions don’t seem to be fazing people. Sure, Texans would prefer for it to be cooler, but the heat is apparently just this side of tolerable. Many residents of Phoenix and Dallas spend their summer days rotating between air-conditioned houses, air-conditioned cars, and air-conditioned offices, minimizing the felt impact of the triple-digit heat. “The fact that people are moving more into climate-risky places, and away from lower-risk places, suggests either that climate risk isn’t a primary factor that’s driving this, or that something else, like the cost of housing, is weighing out more than the climate risks,” Schuetz says. Knowledge of flood risk can nudge people toward lower-risk homes, according to a study by Redfin, but it’s unclear if this is true for more widespread climate risks, like heat. What’s the “safer” house if 100 percent of a county has a high heat risk?

It would be unfair to write off people moving to the Sun Belt as irrational or ignorant. We would all love a cheap house and a good job in a city that’s just warm enough. But life involves compromise. There aren’t enough houses in California. There aren’t enough jobs in Cleveland. Sometimes the best you can afford is Phoenix. “We can’t tell them not to move there,” Schuetz says, “unless we make it feasible for them to live in other places that are lower risk.”