Slashdot Mirror
How Would an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Die?
ananyo writes "According to the accepted account, an astronaut falling into a black hole would be ripped apart, and his remnants crushed as they plunged into the black hole's infinitely dense core. Calculations by Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, though, point to a different end: quantum effects turn the event horizon into a seething maelstrom of particles and anyone who fell in would hit a wall of fire and be burned to a crisp in an instant. There's one problem with the firewall theory. If Polchinski is right, then either general relativity or quantum mechanics is wrong and his work has triggered a mini-crisis in theoretical physics."
The /. I knew and loved a decade ago is gone.
The problem is that we won't be able to observe what happens to them inside the event horizon. If you want to be sure, you have to go yourself.
TFA is an interesting article about a physicist apparently discovering an inherent contradiction between general relativity and quantum mechanics. The "black hole" stuff is really just the context that led to the apparent contradiction: the real issue is much deeper than that. It's depressing that the real underlying hypothesis isn't considered newsworthy, and the editor feels the need to lead with the "black hole" stuff.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
This isn't true.
QM and *special* relativity get along just fine. When you combine them in a simple way you get predictions like antimatter, the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, and so on. If you do this in a more detailed way, using quantum field theory, you get the fantastically accurate predictions of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of quantum chromodynamics that can't be solved with pen and paper but which still gives accurate predictions when done on supercomputers, and so forth.
And there's nothing forbidding QM from playing nice with general relativity, either; we just don't know how it works yet. There are some models, like lattice quantum gravity, that seem quite promising.
And there's nothing forbidding QM from playing nice with general relativity, either; we just don't know how it works yet.
Translation: As currently formulated, at least one of quantum mechanics and general relativity is wrong, although like Newtonian mechanics or pre-relativistic optics, they will undoubtedly continue to be practical and very accurate approximations.
We knew this as soon as quantum mechanics was developed.