In March 2012, Joseph Polchinski began to contemplate suicide — at least in mathematical form. A string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Polchinski was pondering what would happen to an astronaut who dived into a black hole. Obviously, he would die. But how?

Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?Authors: Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, James Sully

http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123

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.

http://www.nature.com/news/astrophysics-fire-in-the-hole-1.12726

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