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I mean, the paper you linked below describes the situation fairly well. We know the current semiclassical understanding of gravity is incomplete, but near the e
by daxfohl 2y ago
I mean, the paper you linked below describes the situation fairly well. We know the current semiclassical understanding of gravity is incomplete, but near the event horizon of black holes, QFT+GR are sufficient to model the physics. It's only at the Planck level that the math stops working, due to UV divergence. And under QFT+GR, the math shows that black holes can form, that objects can pass the event horizon from their perspective, and the black hole will evaporate later. Not much has changed since the 70's there.
Now, it's entirely possible that a complete theory of quantum gravity comes out and upends our understanding of what happens everywhere in space, including at event horizons, and perhaps it's the case that black holes are never formed. But to date, a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity has yet to be created. But just saying "assume black holes don't form, and all contradictions go away" by itself doesn't really help, because that just says get rid of GR and/or QFT, but doesn't say what to replace them with, beyond "something that doesn't produce black holes". Which, sure, would be great, but the devil is in the details. The more important thing to most people in the field is solving the UV divergence problem anyway, which will answer in detail questions about Planck level effects. Whatever comes out of that will (hopefully) unfold naturally into the answer to the information paradox too.
As far as the final question, nobody knows. That said, care is needed when describing events from different perspectives. The principle of relativity isn't that all observers agree on all events. It's that physics is the same in all frames of reference. Which is nuanced: what does one mean by "the physics"? In essence, it's a layman's statement of Noether's Theorem, relating symmetries and conservation laws. So, depending on quantum gravity's symmetries, different observers could see wildly different sequences of events, but they would agree that the conserved properties of the theory were indeed conserved. But until such a theory exists, it's anybody's guess as to what those symmetries actually are.