Toast or spaghetti?
That’s the question that physicists have been trying to answer for the last year and a half. After agreeing for decades that anything—or anyone—unlucky enough to fall into a black hole would be ripped and stretched into spaghetti-like strands by the overwhelming gravity, theorists are now contending with the possibility that infalling matter is instead incinerated by a “toasty” wall of fire at the black hole’s horizon. Now, Stephen Hawking has proposed a radical solution: nixing one of the most infamous characteristics of a black hole, its event horizon, or point of no return.