ABSTRACT
Jácome (Jay) Armas's journey has taken him across continents, disciplines and cultures, always in pursuit of intellectual challenges and new perspectives. From his studies in Portugal and Ireland, to his master's at Cambridge and his PhD in Denmark and partly in India, his path has been anything but conventional. ‘After Cambridge, I felt like I could do anything I wanted to,’ he reflects. He was trained as a string theorist while his research revolved around the mysteries of black holes, specifically their possible underlying structure. ‘Black holes are massive and seem to swallow everything. They might exist in more than four dimensions according to string theory. When the famous Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes are thermodynamic objects, possessing temperature and pressure, the fundamental question shifted: What is the deeper structure from which black holes emerge and what are black holes made of?’
