The "firewalls" idea is rather different than Hawking radiation; it's a new notion that's been a subject of intense debate and interest in the relativity/high e

The "firewalls" idea is rather different than Hawking radiation; it's a new notion that's been a subject of intense debate and interest in the relativity/high energy physics community for the past couple of years. Your confusion about how a "maximum speed" can coexist with "every reference frame is equally valid" (i.e. relativity) is completely understandable: it's really weird. One way of framing the basic issue is that the equations for how relative velocity works aren't as simple as we intuitively think they should be. "If I'm going 55mph and someone passes me 15mph faster than that, they must be going 70mph" is an awfully good approximation at low speeds, but it just turns out that the universe doesn't quite work that way when the speeds get really high. It's tough to wrap your brain around it, absolutely. (I like using "space-time diagrams" to visualize this. Here's a handout from one of my classes a few years back that probably isn't self-contained enough to understand from scratch but might convey a bit of the gist of it: http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/classes/spacetime.pdf http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/classes/spacetime.pdf )