Further to “Hawking now says there are no black holes” and “the fallout,” New Scientist is calling it a “cosmological Wild West.”
As New Scientist tells it,
Hawking’s notion does away with a key part of a black hole – its event horizon. It sounds far out, and has been met with heated debate, but even if Hawking is wrong, his high-profile claim highlights the fact that efforts to solve the paradox have turned cosmology on its ear. Firewalls have turned this corner of physics into a cosmic Wild West: a strange frontier where black holes can take on the form of exotic stars, fuzzballs, time machines or iced wormholes (see “The firewall paradox”).
The pillars of theoretical physics – quantum mechanics and general relativity – are in a stand-off. One of them will have to blink if this paradox is to be undone.
Somewhere, Einstein and Bohr are playing chess by the pool …
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips
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