An excerpt from an article in Nature:
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According to the then-accepted account, he wouldn’t feel anything special at first, even when his fall took him through the black hole’s event horizon: the invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape. But eventually — after hours, days or even weeks if the black hole was big enough — he would begin to notice that gravity was tugging at his feet more strongly than at his head. As his plunge carried him inexorably downwards, the difference in forces would quickly increase and rip him apart, before finally crushing his remnants into the black hole’s infinitely dense core.
But Polchinski’s calculations, carried out with two of his students — Ahmed Almheiri and James Sully — and fellow string theorist Donald Marolf at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), were telling a different story1. In their account, quantum effects would turn the event horizon into a seething maelstrom of particles. Anyone who fell into it would hit a wall of fire and be burned to a crisp in an instant.
The team’s verdict, published in July 2012, shocked the physics community. Such firewalls would violate a foundational tenet of physics that was first articulated almost a century ago by Albert Einstein, who used it as the basis of general relativity, his theory of gravity. Known as the equivalence principle, it states in part that an observer falling in a gravitational field — even the powerful one inside a black hole — will see exactly the same phenomena as an observer floating in empty space. Without this principle, Einstein’s framework crumbles.
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The result has been a flurry of research papers about firewalls, all struggling to resolve the impasse, none succeeding to everyone’s satisfaction. Steve Giddings, a quantum physicist at the UCSB, describes the situation as “a crisis in the foundations of physics that may need a revolution to resolve”.
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Imagine that!
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