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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."
While yes, one of the things you would have to deal with is the incredibly hot material swirling around the event horizon which, in and of itself, should produce enough X-rays to fry you, I think this article is actually talking more about an actual characteristic of the event horizon, as opposed to what is in orbit around it, or even what is infalling.
In short, space is supposed to look the same to an observer no matter what side of the event horizon they are on. Instead, a special condition where you smack into something that is there beyond what you would expect from a black hole with infalling matter occurs. That "wall of fire" obviously consists of stuff that has entered the event horizon of the black hole, but it is structured in such a way as to form a highly energetic barrier that should not be there based on our current understanding of relativity or quantum mechanics.