Alice and Bob meet the wall of fire

[pendell]

cool article for a science piece (https://simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/mathematics-and-physical-science/alice-and-bob-meet-the-wall-of-fire/). I'm still not quite understanding how this is supposed to overthrow the general theory of relativity. Absent experimental proof, it's just one more theory along with string theory and all the rest of it.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Flickerdart]

Great, so now black holes are on fire. I guess we went up a level.

[Urpriest]

cool article for a science piece (https://simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/mathematics-and-physical-science/alice-and-bob-meet-the-wall-of-fire/). I'm still not quite understanding how this is supposed to overthrow the general theory of relativity. Absent experimental proof, it's just one more theory along with string theory and all the rest of it.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It's not the same sort of thing as String Theory. What this is is a paradox: the current way we think about these things is contradictory, and since Black Holes really exist (ask any astronomer), there must be some way out of the puzzle. There are several proposed solutions, but we don't know which is right yet. It might be possible to figure out which is right without doing experiments, since it could be that the other options are inconsistent, but it might also be that we'll never know until someone finds an old enough black hole, which might be impossible as this might not be a problem until black holes are older than the universe is right now.

As to whether it "overthrows" general relativity, that depends on which solution you take. We have to throw out something, that's the nature of paradoxes. But whatever gets "overthrown" will still mostly be true, we'll simply have discovered another layer to the puzzle.