Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum QM versus GR a new battlefield

Fresh from it's win over SR and the discovery of the Higgs QM is picking a fight with big daddy of them all GR.

It started innocently enough with a paper by Joe Polchinski, Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf and James Sully called "Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?"

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.3123.pdf

At first I expected that there would be an easy explaination but it appears that the paper does indeed hold a very big paradox the sort that will crunch one of the major tenants of science.

The layman discussion is presented in an article from scientific america and discovery

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...ical-physicists
http://news.discovery.com/space/black-hole-drama-firewalls-121226.htm

This discussion is the hot and must discuss thing in physics at the moment everyone is lining up on different sides and there is going to be some bruised egos.

Come on Orac, I don't need more headaches trying to follow all of this stuff. I was happy when we just said that GR and QM were incompatible at the extremes and some day we will figure it all out. Now they are coming up with even more problems. I really wanted to be able to sit back and be comfortable with what I think I know. Now what I think I know is all wrong again.

Bill Gill

Haha doesn't work like that things will change rapidly for the next few years as we have massive new understandings. Then all will go quiet and slow, we see this pattern repeated over and over again in science.

I remember the 70's where new particles were found every week and the excitement of going to work each day and it has that same feel about science at the moment.