What is a black hole firewall? How does it solve some paradoxes when it comes to black holes? Do the firewalls actually exist? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Sometimes you just can't catch a break. You take one step forward and two steps back. It seems like everything goes wrong and it all starts from one little problem that just cascades into a miserable day. Like like your alarm doesn't go off. So you start rushing and you rush, so you you spill your coffee on your shirt and so you change your shirt, but then you're laid out the door and you're laid out the door. So you get stuck in bad traffic. You get stuck in bad traffic. So you miss that really important meeting with the boss because you miss that really important meeting with the boss. You get fired. It just goes on and on and on and on. Every time you think you come up with one solution, you just invent five more problems. You just can't catch a break. Welcome to life As a theoretical physicist trying to understand black holes, I'm going to talk about a very theoretical idea today, something called the firewall Theory. Firewall theory is a confusing idea. I like. I just promise that a lot of the topics that I'm gonna talk about in today's episode will be confusing, and they're going to be confusing to you because they are confusing to physics.
There is this misconception I encounter all the time that, like physicists, in theory, the smartest people on the planet and they they know what they're talking about. They know what they're doing. And if a topic doesn't make sense, it's somehow our fault. As a non physicist, it has nothing to do with with their wisdom and knowledge of the universe. No, when it comes to black holes, when it comes to what we're gonna talk about about black holes today in today's episode of Black Holes because we just spend a lot of time talking about black holes because black holes are confusing and they're confusing to physicists, they don't make sense. And so the answers that physicists have to some of the problems surrounding black holes are themselves confusing because we're not exactly clear what's going on firewall theory. What I'm gonna talk about today is confusing to you. It's confusing to me. It's confusing to the people who came up with the idea. There is a chance, a solid chance that not a single thing I'll talk about in this episode will make any sense whatsoever because of the physicists themselves have no idea what's going on and are just finding solutions to problems which lead to even more problems, which lead to even more problems.
They just can't catch a break, and the first problem to crop up with black holes is the whole horizon thing. My black holes are these regions of space time, which we discovered in general relativity. And as I've told before, when we first discovered them in general relativity, everyone's like No way can that something, something that confusing some that weird ever exist in nature. It turns out they exist in nature. If you just take a bunch of material and collapse it down below a certain critical threshold called the Short Shield radius, it just keeps on collapsing. No known force of nature can overwhelm it. It just shrinks down to an infinitely tiny point called the singularity. The singularity is its own ball of confusing, which is not the subject of today's episode. What I'm gonna talk about is the other thing about black holes. Besides the singularity, the event horizon, the boundary of a black hole. This this one way barrier that if you fall within the event horizon of a black hole, you simply can't get out, because in order to get out, you have to travel faster than the speed of light.
And you can't travel faster than the speed of light. You can't get out. One of the most important things about the event horizon, at least in general relativity, is how they they are very special because once you fall in, you can't get out. But on the other hand, they're not special at all. You don't know that you're at the event horizon of Black Hole. There is no wall. There is no bright flashes of energy. There is no siren. You don't get an alert on your smartphone. There is nothing. It just looks like any other random patch of nondescript space. It's only once you turn around and try to leave, do you discover that you're trapped inside the black hole? But other than that, you don't know that you're inside of a black hole until you try to leave. The event horizon is nothing special in general relativity. A cool analogy that I've encountered is imagine you're on a boat and you're on a river, and the river is approaching a waterfall, and as the river gets closer and closer to the waterfall, it's going faster and faster and faster.
And if you're on your boat and you reach a certain point close to the waterfall and you realize you're at the waterfall and you try to turn around, if the current is too strong, you can't leave. You will fall over the edge of the water. But that point in the river doesn't look any different than any other point in the river. It's only once you try to turn your boat around and leave. Do you realize that you are doomed? Once you cross the event horizon, you will hit the singularity in a finite amount of time. And that's miserable but also the subject of another episode, the other important part about the event horizon. Other than the fact that it's boring, you know, to look at it's less boring to experience, but it's boring to look at is that everything that falls into a black hole gets trapped inside everything. All the stuff that falls into a black hole gets trapped inside of a black hole forever, according to general relativity and also all black holes look the same. If you have two black holes and they have the same mass, the same electric charge and the same spin, you can't tell them apart and you don't know what fell into them.
You could have stuffed a whole bunch of stars into one black hole and a whole bunch of cats into the other black hole. And as long as they have the same mass in electric charge and spin, you don't know which was the star black hole. And which one was the cat black hole? They're indistinguishable. So all this is weird, like General Vague, you know, black hole weirdness. But over like 50 years, physics came to terms with that reality with the reality of this weirdness about black holes. And we're like, OK, we get it. Singularities! Event horizons indistinguishable. Fine. But then we started looking at the whole event horizon thing more and another problem cropped up, which is the whole hawking radiation thing. I've done an episode on that before, so I'll give you a brief recap here because it's important for our story, and I've told different versions of the Hawking radiation story. Before what I believe to be a more accurate interpretation of the mathematics, I'm going to give a certain version of the story that isn't exactly faithful to the mathematics.
But in this case, as we start getting into weirdness or like firewalls, it's useful to use that kind of language here. And the language is like the common story about hawking radiation. Empty space is not purely empty space. It's a frothing, seething mess in the vacuum of particles appearing and then disappearing instantaneously well, almost instantaneously, like very, very quickly, like they pop into existence. And then it's It's a matter and an antimatter pair, and then they find each other and annihilate. So they borrow a little bit of energy from the universe from like the Bank of the Universe, and they borrow a little bit of energy and they exist for a little bit, and then they annihilate and they give that energy back to the universe and everything's cool. This happens everywhere, including at the event horizon, and Stephen Hawking was the first person to start or one of the first people to start really looking at the intersection of gravity, which is what we used to understand black holes in quantum mechanics, which is what we used to understand, like everything else in the universe.
And he found some weirdness at the event horizon. He found that this random pairs of particles that pop into existence and then immediately leave like like walking into the wrong bathroom. You're like, Whoops didn't mean to be here. I'm gonna leave happens at the event horizon of a black hole. And when it does, sometimes one of the pairs can be inside the event horizon, and one of the pairs can be outside. The one that's inside can't leave it can't find its friend, and the one that's outside sometimes can fall back in to the black hole and it meets and everything's cool. But sometimes it can just fly away because, like, who cares? And when that happens, from our perspective, the black hole is emitting a particle or a bit of radiation, a bit of energy that energy has to cost. Something has to come from somewhere you can't borrow from the bank of the universe forever, so who pays for it? The black hole pays for it. It emits a little bit of radiation. In exchange, it loses a little bit of mass OK, end result because of the weirdness of the event horizon. You know that key problem of the event horizon that lets things in but doesn't let things out.
That is a problem that we are trying to solve. Hawking was trying to understand it with quantum mechanics. He found an even bigger problem. It turns out that black holes aren't entirely black. They emit radiation. This is not a huge issue in and of itself. It took another, like 50 years for physicists to come to terms with hawking radiation, and they're pretty sure it's correct. The math seems to hold up. Everything we understand about quantum mechanics like seems to point to the fact that hawking radiation is legit. But things start to go really downhill with the whole information paradox thing, and I've done an episode on that, all right, trust me, it it this is all gonna have a payoff here because I can't just jump right into firewalls, like literally, because you get burned to a crisp but also intellectually, because it's gonna take us a while to build up the firewalls. So just If you're wondering where the heck the firewalls are, just be patient. I need to build this up and why they're a problem solution, but also a problem, right? Black Hole Information. Paradox. The thing. So everything we know about quantum mechanics says that information is conserved.
You know, like physics is always physics, whether it's quantum or classical or whatever. And if you know the initial state of the system, you can use the laws of physics to figure out what the final state, how it evolves with time and you can also work backwards. If you know the final state, then you can run the laws of physics backwards to get the initial state. So that means that information has to be preserved. Somehow you can't delete information. You can't copy information because if you could, if information could go in and out of existence all willy nilly, that means you couldn't like predict the future. If you know the state of the system now, you can't know where it's gonna be tomorrow, and you can't work backwards like, Oh, if I know the state of the system today, I should be able to figure out what the system was yesterday. This is like the whole point of physics is to figure out the time evolution of systems, and if information can be copied or destroyed, then we can't do that and all of physics breaks down.
And physics seems to be pretty well tested, being able to explain the interactions of nature. So we we're pretty sure that's correct. So the big question with information paradox is if you have a black hole horizon, which only lets things in and never lets things out, then you add quantum mechanics to that. And, it turns out, Whoops it easy. Black holes aren't totally black. They do emit a little bit of radiation. You have to ask what happens to the information when the black hole evaporates. If stuff falls in to the black hole, All this information, all the history, all the quantum states and particles fall into the black hole. Hawking radiation in Hawking's original solution was purely thermal. It was noisy, it was just static. It didn't carry any information. So if all the information goes into the black hole and then hawking radiation leaks out. But it itself doesn't carry in any any information with it, and then the black hole evaporates and disappears. Where did the information go hence paradox.
OK, so we've got a problem, which is event horizons. We try to solve the event horizons of quantum mechanics. We get another problem, which is hawking radiation, and then when we need to solve hawking radiation. Now there's this information paradox thing. Here's a tempting solution to solve the information paradox. Maybe information is actually embedded in hawking radiation. Hawking's original idea had the radiation being completely thermal. Like I said, a fancy physics way of saying noisy, like If you speak into a microphone instead, just random static comes out. That's like thermal. But maybe Hawking was wrong about that. Maybe hawking radiation does contain information. Maybe everything that falls into a black hole somehow does get imprinted somehow on hawking radiation. And that in principle, if you were to carefully monitor the hugging radiation, you can reconstruct what fell into the black hole. Maybe by staring at hawking radiation, you could tell the star based black hole from the cat based black hole. Maybe, but here's the problem.
Lots of problems Information went through the event horizon like stars went into that black hole cats went into that black hole. They fell through the event horizon. They can't come out via hawking radiation because that's the whole point of an event. Horizon is it locks stuff in. Once you go past there, you can't get out. So if you want hawking radiation to preserve a memory of everything that goes through well, that's gonna violate the whole point of a black hole, which is the event horizon, which is doesn't let anything out. So if the cat falls into the black hole Sorry, cats. I actually like cats. I don't know why I'm using them as an example here. But like if a cat falls into a black hole like sorry, pal, you are locked away from the universe forever. That's the whole point. That's how we understand black holes. So maybe the event horizon isn't a really thing, but General Relativity says it is, and general relativity has been tested like crazy. Everywhere we look everywhere we test black holes. The Event Horizon idea holds up just fine. Maybe the information gets copied. Maybe one bit of the information does fall into the black hole, and the other bit of the information.
A copy of it stays preserved on the outside and then that leaks out via hockey radiation. But I just told you that quantum mechanics doesn't let you arbitrarily copy information. So what the heck, what's going on? How can we solve this? Well, maybe our understanding of quantum mechanics is incomplete. Like is this little quantum mechanics thing like we have general relativity saying Event horizons don't lend anything out. And we have quantum mechanics saying information can't be copied. We need one of those to break. Maybe it's quantum mechanics. Maybe it's flat out wrong. Maybe we're totally missing the boat on black holes. When it comes to quantum mechanics. Well, the answer is probably We do not fully understand black holes. We do not have a solution to black holes. A full treatment of black holes, an accurate picture of black holes singularity event horizon. The whole deal requires a theory of quantum gravity. We do not have a theory of quantum gravity. That's a really, really hard problem that we've been struggling with for like a century now, and basically nobody knows how to solve it. So instead of waiting and saying, you know what?
We'll figure out the whole black hole thing after we've solved quantum gravity. No one really likes doing that. No one, especially theoretical physicists like just waiting around. So instead of trying to tackle the hard problem of quantum gravity, we're just gonna, like, try to tackle this little piece meal like maybe, like poke at the problem a little bit or try to extract some clues. And so So what I'm about to present is our attempts our modern attempts to solve the information paradox without actually so having a theory of quantum gravity. Like the real solution to the black Hole Information paradox sits in quantum gravity world. We do not have access to quantum gravity world, so instead, we're just gonna take stabs in the dark at it. And maybe that will shake something loose, and we'll gain some new understanding. The whole quantum gravity pie is just way too big to eat, so instead, we're gonna take a tiny little sliver and munch on that and hopefully we'll learn something useful. That little sliver is called black Hole complementarity, and instead of sacrificing quantum mechanics and our knowledge of how information works, it's gonna sacrifice a little bit of general relativity.
It's gonna say maybe the event horizons aren't so bland and nondescript. Maybe when you fall into a black hole there are different perspectives and that this whole information paradox thing can be solved if we take a better look at perspectives. If you were to fall into a black hole, you're full of information. You know your particles and your quantum states and your chemical bonds and and what you had for breakfast this morning, all that falls into the black hole, you carry it with you through the event horizon and down into the singularity, which is oblivion. Your information according to your perspective, all that information fell into the black hole with you. But from my perspective, watching you. And yes, you are gonna be the one to go into the black hole. I'm OK out here, me watching you, you and all your information. Your your quantum states, your particles, your atomic me, molecular bonds, what you had for breakfast instead of falling into the black hole, gets smeared out across the horizon, never quite falling in.
It looks like you get stuck right on the horizon. And then one day far into the future. That information that is smeared across the surface, like like cream cheese on a bagel, slowly leaks away as hawking radiation. And so it's all just fine. Hold on, hold on, hold on. It sounds like I'm talking myself in circles. It sounds like I'm contradicting myself because I literally just said you can't copy information. And now I'm saying like, Well, uh, some information goes into the black hole, and then that same information stays on the outside. This is according to this idea of black hole complementarity. Not as bad as it sounds. This idea is credited to Roger Penrose, who developed it in the 19 nineties. He said, Look, general relativity already says there are two perspectives. I never watch you fall into a black hole, even in classical general relativity. From my perspective on the outside, you do get stuck on the outside of the event horizon because of the extreme gravity, the extreme red shift like I never actually get to witness you falling through the event horizon.
You just get infinitely slowed down infinitely red shifted, but you never quite cross. So, like GR already says that there's some different perspectives going on with black holes and because the event horizon is a barrier to communication. This isn't strictly a copying of the information. From your perspective, the information falls through the event Horizon hits the singularity. From my perspective, it stays on the outside. Once you go into the black hole, we can never communicate. We can never compare notes. We can never see both versions of the information you have to pick one. Which version of the information do you want? Do you want the version that fell into the black hole and hit the singularity, or do you want the version that stayed smeared across the surface? It's not a copy of the information. It's just two different perspectives on the information that can never compare notes.
It's called complementarity because complementarity happens in quantum mechanics all the time. For example, you can never access both the position and momentum simultaneously of a particle. You have to pick one. Do you want to measure the position, or do you want to measure the momentum? You know Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to objects falling into a black hole. You wanna measure the position or you wanna measure the momentum, You pick one. You wanna measure the information that fell into the black hole, or you wanna measure the information that got stuck on the outside, You gotta pick one. These perspectives are complementary, like it sounds loopy and confusing, but at least at first glance, when it was proposed in the 19 nineties, it checked out. Information is preserved. Quantum mechanics is preserved. Patreon is preserved. Patreon dot com slash PM so you can keep supporting this show. I am eternally grateful. My gratitude will last longer than a black hole slowly decaying by hawking radiation. That's how grateful I am.
That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter to keep these shows going. But all that's preserved. OK, there's a slight modification to general relativity because General relativity says nothing special should happen at the event horizon. And now, with this complementarity idea is saying, Well, now it's the event horizon. There's two different perspectives of of the information. One goes down to the singularity, one gets smeared across the surface. From our point of view. The part that gets smeared across the surface eventually leaks out via hawking radiation. OK, OK, so we had to massage general relativity a little bit, but someone had to give in order to solve this whole paradox thing. So for a while we thought we had finally developed a solution to all of our black hole problems that led from the existence of the event horizon in the first place, all the way through hawking radiation information. Paradox. Now we have complementarity except, except this black hole complementarity idea had its own problems.
So now I've got to work on that. Is anyone else getting a headache? I know I am. Here's one of the major issues with black hole complementarity. We don't actually have a solution for it. We don't have a complete set of equations that you know, actually describe in math. The scenario that I just described in words Black Hole complementarity is an idea, not a fully formed theory of nature. Nobody's been able to crack it like Roger Penrose suggested it and like drew a sketch of this like a mathematical sketch of maybe what's happening. But no one's been able to flesh that out in sufficient detail that you can actually make a solid working theory of physics. Nobody can tell the story of black hole complementarity with math the same way we tell the story of, I don't know, planets orbiting the sun with math. It's just not there yet, so that's a bit of a letdown. It's been, you know, almost 30 years since Ben suggested complementarity. And we don't have a fully fleshed out theory of how it works, which is, of course, we took a very tiny slice of quantum gravity of that pie, and it was still too much to handle.
We thought, Well, we're not gonna talk about all quantum gravity. Maybe we're just gonna explore this complementarity idea and even that is like a little bit too much heavy lifting for us to solve. Remember the real true solution to what is happening at the event horizon of a black hole of the real true solution to the black hole information paradox is found in quantum gravity, but we don't have that. Instead, we have these guesses like complementarity, and we can't even have all of that. So that's a bit of a letdown. And then, as some theorist were poking around trying to make some head wave of complementarity, they discovered something nasty about it, which, as you'll recall, black hole complementarity, is a solution to a problem, which is a solution to a problem, which is a solution to a problem, which this solution has problems of its own. This is like the inception of particle physics problems, and we're like three levels deep right now, or maybe four. I lost count. The initial problem is the existence of an event horizon, and now we're down here.
There's something nasty in complementarity is that when you start to follow the math, what little of it you have, you find that too much information leaves the black hole when the black hole is only halfway done evaporating. It's actually lost all of its information. But, um, wait a minute. If the black hole is evaporating, it's leaking out Information. Then, when it's halfway done when it's lost half its mass through hawking radiation, it's actually lost all of its information. But the black hole is still there, radiating, so something is seriously, fundamentally, deeply wrong with the whole complementarity idea. I'm gonna make a quick side note here that there's a lot more math to the complementarity idea, and it relies on holography, which we've talked about in other episodes of. I'm skipping all of that because this episode is already a headache. But the key idea is that complementarity leads to too much information loss, which means we haven't done Jack squat about the information paradox question.
Originally, we had hawking radiation. We're like, Where does all the information go? Now we have complementarity, and we're like, Where does all the information go? We've just transformed the Black Hole information paradox into a much more subtle and much more difficult to follow paradox. And this is after working on the paradox question for decades. Anyway, this is bad news. Something has to give. We have three facts or three pieces of knowledge that somewhere one of them has to break down. These three pieces of information are one black holes and hawking radiation. Obey quantum mechanics. Two. The mathematical tools that we're using to describe all of this are close enough to accurate that they're giving us sensible results. And three general relativity is correct and says that nothing is super special about the event horizon itself. Something has to give because if all of these are true, we end up with the information paradox. And even when we try to patch it together with complementarity and bend to GR just a little bit, we still end up with the information paradox. For various reasons, physicists are loathe to take door number one or Door number two.
They don't want to change quantum mechanics, and they don't want to change their mathematical tools. They would argue it's because we're really, really confident about those statements that we're really confident about how quantum mechanics works. We're really confident about hawking radiation. We're really confident about mathematical tools that we're using to approximate all this and try to make progress. It might be fair to say that changing either of those is just too darn difficult to attempt, and so we don't even bother. It's fair to say that I'm not necessarily saying that, but it'd be fair to say that that physicists are just a little bit too scared about trying to tackle quantum mechanics right there at the boundary of a black hole. And so they tend to go for number three. They say, Maybe general relativity isn't correct. And maybe there is something special about the horizon. I mean, complementarity idea itself already cracked the door open for that. But it was just like a little patchwork fix. Like we're just gonna change the black hole Event horizon just a tiny bit. Something does special happen to information at the event horizon, but now we're just gonna blast the whole thing down.
The leading solution to the issues with complementarity is that the event horizon is an illusion. Instead, it's a firewall. And yes, here we are, a half hour into an episode about black hole firewalls and we're finally talking about black hole firewalls. Do you see why I didn't do this at the top of the show? It's because we it took a long way to get here. Have you built a firewall? Good question. There's one other bit I need to introduce here so we can build a firewall. I talked earlier when I was talking about the black hole complementarity idea where one viewpoint of the information that goes down into the singularity, the other viewpoint has it stuck to the event horizon, and then it eventually leaks out via hawking radiation, and you can carefully watch that hawking radiation and use it to reconstruct all the information that fell into the black hole. I talked about it like it was no big deal, but it turns out, in order for that process to work, you need entanglement. I've done an episode on entanglement recently, and it's a good thing because I don't want to get into it now.
Entanglement is what happens when two quantum systems, or or two particles share a single unified quantum system where they, uh, become strongly correlated with each other where they share a common state. We don't need to worry about the details of entanglement too much, except to say that for complementarity to work, you need a lot of entanglement. You need the particles that pop into existence to create that hawking radiation in the first place. You need them to be entangled. You need entanglement. For every particle that does come out in hawking radiation, it needs to be entangled with every other particle that's come out via hawking radiation. So all the hawking radiation that has ever been emitted from the black hole needs to be entangled with each other. That seems a bit cumbersome, but like OK, let's just go with the mathematics. How complementarity works. It's like the mechanism to allow it to work. But that mechanism is taking away too much information. That mechanism, by the time the black hole is halfway done radiating, it's lost all of its information, but it still exists, so it obviously still has information.
So the resolution to this is to break the entanglement. Once you break the entanglement, then less information comes out. Maybe we're not exactly sure on that. But hold on here. Maybe if you break the entanglement between the hawking radiation particles between what's been previously emitted, then not as much information comes out and you are able to solve the paradox. But breaking entanglement is like breaking an atomic bond or a chemical bond. It releases energy. And so what we have here is a firewall when you reach the event horizon and there are these two different perspectives. One perspective is you falling down to the singularity. The other perspective is you getting smeared on the horizon that involves a massive breaking of entanglement, and that breaking of entanglement releases energy, which burns you to a crisp.
So if I saw you fall into a black hole, your info would get smeared all across and eventually come out as hawking radiation. In principle, I could put you back together again. It would take a lot of work because, like in principle, if I burn a book, I can still put it back together again. It's like very, very difficult, but not impossible. But what you would see you would not sail through the event horizon and reach the singularity. You would see this wall of searing energies and you would just get destroyed. You would hit the firewall. The firewall can't be seen from the outside from the outside of a black hole. Because the firewall exists at the event horizon, we don't get to see stuff at the event horizon. The gravitational red shift is too strong. We don't get to see things, so if the firewall exists, we don't get to see it. The only way to see it is to encounter it at the event horizon, but its existence breaks down. All the entanglements allows black hole complementarity to proceed, preserves the right amount of information through hawking radiation and everything is OK.
This is a radical alteration of general relativity. The black Hole firewall idea preserves quantum mechanics preserves what we know about information preserves what we know about using our language of quantum mechanics near the boundary of a black hole and trusting that it's accurate. But it breaks general relativity in a huge way. General Relativity said that there is nothing special about the event horizon. You wouldn't know it's there. You only find out about it once you try to leave. The firewall idea says, Oh yeah, you notice it big time. It is a searing wall of energies that fry you to a crisp. That's something you don't see in the everyday universe. Nobody knows if the firewall ID is correct, really. This is 1/4 level inception style solution to trying to solve the whole black hole thing in the existence of Event Horizons in the first place. This solution carries its own problems.
Like some people point out, wait a minute. If general relativity totally breaks down at the event, Horizon is getting the nature of the event horizon 100% totally wrong. Then how can we possibly trust it anywhere else? Everywhere we go to test a general relativity, including observations of black holes colliding with their event horizons. Merging it comes out fine. But then you're telling me it's way off the mark here. Critics say that the firewall, like you just can't spontaneously form a brick wall in the middle of space just because you feel like it. Theoretically, And so just because you feel like it in the math doesn't mean nature spontaneously forms a giant flaming wall at its boundary of the boundary of a black hole just because you feel like it. But then proponents say, Look, it kind of sort of works. We got this black hole information paradox thing. We got the complementarity idea, which is like our best idea to solving the paradox, but it's releasing too much information. So maybe if we break some of the entanglement, it's not that big of a deal.
And maybe this is a window to quantum gravity. Maybe this is helping us understand quantum gravity. Something has to give in general relativity or quantum ins in order to get us to quantum gravity. Maybe this is it. Maybe it's at the event horizon. My take. I feel like we're all just dancing around solutions of quantum gravity, which is what it will really take to solve the information paradox and what's actually happening at an event horizon. To me, things like the firewall are just signals that we still haven't cracked it yet that I don't know if the firewall idea is correct or not. But I feel like we're so off base. We're just We're just repeating the same problem over and over again, just with different words. We're finding ever more sophisticated ways to express this breakdown of general relativity and quantum mechanics. This fundamental incompatibility. We need to explore these incompatibilities in order to get a solution of quantum gravity. But I think I feel like all we're doing right now is just restating the problem over and over and over again.
Because firewalls, which are their own solution to another problem which are a solution to a problem, et cetera, et cetera, have their own problems. So eventually we hope we stop running out of problems. But it looks like we're just kicking the can down the road or not. I mean, we kind of have no idea what we're doing. We just can't catch a break. Thank you to Eric H on Facebook at Wardo Computer on Twitter Adriano S on email and Jonathan D on YouTube for the questions that led to today's episode Thank you Again to my top patreon contributors. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter Matthew K, Justin Z, Justin G, Camino Duncan MD Barbara Kay Dude Robert and Nate HF, Chris Cameron, NAIA Aone, Tom B, Scott M, Rob H and Lowell T. I can't thank you enough seriously. Patreon dot com slash PM Sutter Keep those questions coming to hashtag Ask us Spaceman. Ask us spaceman at gmail dot com. Go to my website. Ask apace man dot com. You can see all the show. No archives. Please leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast, download or thingy.
I really do appreciate it, and I'll see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.