On April 1 at 7:00 PM in Almaty, astrophysicist and science popularizer Kirill Maslennikov will give a lecture titled “Exotic Physics of Black Holes.” Black holes are among the most paradoxical objects in the Universe. Just a century ago, they existed only in Einstein’s equations — and today, astronomers can not only see them but even hear them. We will discuss the most fascinating questions of modern cosmology: What really happens beyond the event horizon — the boundary beyond which everything disappears, including light; Why time slows down and space bends to the extreme near a black hole; What a singularity is; What the temperature of a black hole means; What white holes and wormholes are; Kirill Maslennikov will invite you to look beyond the event horizon — to a place where no ray of light can reach, and where our familiar concepts of time and matter lose their meaning. During the lecture, we’ll trace how physicists moved from theoretical models to direct observations — from Einstein and Schwarzschild to the EHT telescope and the LIGO detectors. We’ll discuss Stephen Hawking’s contribution to the study of black holes and why quantum gravity is considered the “Holy Grail” of modern physics, while black holes are the “laboratories of the Universe.”