Can Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox Be Solved With Fuzzballs?

We don’t have a lot of concrete information about black holes. We have a lot of ideas, but we’ve mostly been quite literally shooting in the dark when it comes to figuring out what would happen if you went in one. Now, some theoretical revelations open up a new line of thinking.

The prevailing idea has been the ‘no drama’ theory, where if you’re an astronaut who crosses the event horizon of a black hole, you wouldn’t notice. Until you reach the singularity, that is, and you are quite suddenly ‘spaghettified’ by the impossibly intense gravitational pull. But then where did you go?

To try and rectify the information paradox, physicists have put forward a newer, more dramatic theory about what happens to you--the firewall. They argue that you, the astronaut, must be incinerated as you pass the event horizon and that’s how your information is conserved.

Now, cue the fuzzball. By replacing the particles in a black hole with strings, you get a theoretical black hole model called a fuzzball.  

Instead of the membrane of an event horizon, past which you’d get pulled into a point of infinite density, the fuzzball model has no event horizon, and no singularity. It’s a tangled ball of strings that looks a little more like a planet than our current typical imaginings of a black hole. And those strings, vibrating with the possibilities of multiple dimensions, make up a hot, vibrating extremely dense mass that would incinerate you on impact.