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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> you've convinced me that, if Hawking's model is as you say, it's obviously incorrect

Why? Note that I'm not claiming (and Hawking never claimed) that his model is experimentally verified--that's obviously impossible since Hawking radiation from any black hole we can observe is many orders of magnitude too faint to observe, if it exists and has the intensity predicted by the model. But the model is perfectly self-consistent.

> it all looks fishy

Why?

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I don't have time to explore this topic in depth right now (way too much on my plate already, and I'm not that fast or brilliant), but I suspect there's literature on this topic. Something I could find is this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics)

Basically, my intuition is more or less in line with this firewall phenomenon and that no particle crosses a true event horizon, even in their own frame, and no certainly no singularity.

The firewall hypothesis is one of the quantum gravity hypotheses that is an open area of research, yes. But even if the firewall hypothesis ends up being confirmed (which won't happen any time soon), that does not mean it's the only consistent hypothesis. Your claim was that the classical GR model, and Hawking's original model, were inconsistent. They're not. They might end up not being correct when quantum gravity effects are taken into account, but that doesn't make them inconsistent.

The Firewall as spelled out in the original paper is widely considered to be unlikely, not in the least because it violates the equivalence principle. There are weaker versions of the firewall based in M-Theory which exist because there is no singularity, and the event horizon is actually the surface of the fuzzball which takes its place, but that’s a different sack of weasels.

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