In cricket, there's a special delivery — the googly. The ball spins in a way that deceives the batsman. Physics had its own googly: for nearly half a century, mathematicians couldn't make twistor theory work with real gravity. It described 'nice' fields perfectly, where everything twists in one direction. But as soon as an 'awkward' component appeared, the machinery broke down.
Twistor space is a special geometric world where complex field equations become simpler. The trouble was that for gravity without simplifications, this world fell apart into disconnected pieces. The authors of the new work took a concrete example: the Schwarzschild metric — the solution for the emptiness around a massive object, a black hole. They started with twistor space for a 'nice' gravitational instanton (a special object in Euclidean gravity). Inside it, they found a surface, a quadric, that accounted for the 'awkward' part.
The surface wasn't perfectly smooth from the perspective of the original space. But its 'smooth piece' (the coincidence locus) unexpectedly preserved two important structures: the complex one (responsible for shape) and the Kähler one (responsible for size). Together they gave rise to a genuine four-dimensional geometry — neither 'nice' nor 'awkward,' but complete. This geometry turned out to be conformal (related by a simple stretching) to the Schwarzschild metric.
For the first time, a non-self-dual Einstein metric has been assembled entirely from holomorphic data in twistor space. The googly is caught.
The name 'googly' was coined by a physicist who played cricket. It comes from an Australian slang word meaning 'bulging eyes'—just the face a batsman makes when the ball goes where he didn't expect.
In Carl Sagan's novel 'Contact,' aliens transmit blueprints for a machine that uses higher dimensions. Twistor spaces are a real mathematical tool for working with such 'hidden' dimensions.