For his part, Polchinski doesn't believe that black holes without event horizons are likely to exist in the universe, Nature News reported. "It would be worse than trying to reconstruct a book that you burned from its ashes," Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, told Nature News.īut not everyone is convinced. So although information could escape a black hole's event horizon, the information would be so hopelessly scrambled that it would be very difficult to figure out what it originally came from, Hawking posits. Energy and matter trying to escape the black hole's death grip would be stuck for a time, before eventually being released. Rather than being fixed, these apparent horizons shift wildly with the behavior of quantum particles inside the black hole. "There are, however, apparent horizons which persist for a period of time." "The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking wrote in the paper. To resolve the paradox, Hawking's new paper proposes that there is no fixed boundary of an event horizon. So, which is it: uneventful event horizon, or fiery ring of hell? The firewall messes up the notion of smooth, unwrinkled space-time at the event horizon. (Either way, the astronaut does not make it out alive.) The firewall would incinerate the astronaut before the dense core compressed the astronaut to a tiny speck. Given that these particles represent a type of "information" that can escape the event horizon, Polchinski and colleagues predicted that a fiery, energetic ring should exist just inside the event horizon - at least if quantum theory holds true. In 1974, Hawking theorized that black holes leak particles at their edges - a phenomenon known as Hawking Radiation.
Once inside the hole, the astronaut would be sheared before being crushed at the black hole's infinitely dense core, known as the singularity.īut quantum mechanics, the reigning physics theory that governs the behavior of very small particles, dictates that black holes are not perfect cosmic vacuum cleaners. That's because the astronaut would be in free fall, and should therefore feel the laws of physics the same as if he were anywhere else in the universe, Nature News reported. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the astronaut would approach the event horizon and then pass it, blissfully unaware of impending doom. The paradox relies on a thought experiment involving an astronaut drifting into a black hole. īut two years ago, theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and colleagues discovered a wrinkle in the theory, dubbed the Firewall Paradox. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of black holes - objects so incredibly massive and dense they pull everything nearby into themselves, and past a point known as the event horizon, not even light cannot escape them.