The paper "Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?" by Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully explores the conflict between quantum theory and general relativity in the context of black hole information. The authors argue that three key statements—Hawking radiation being in a pure state, information being emitted from near the horizon, and the infalling observer encountering nothing unusual—cannot all be true. They propose that the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon, or that novel dynamics, likely nonlocal, must extend a macroscopic distance from the horizon. The paper discusses various thought experiments and the implications of these findings, including the possibility of a firewall at the horizon. The authors also consider the extension of these arguments to higher partial waves and the relaxation of certain postulates, concluding that the only consistent scenarios involve either a firewall or novel dynamics that violate semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon.The paper "Black Holes: Complementarity or Firewalls?" by Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully explores the conflict between quantum theory and general relativity in the context of black hole information. The authors argue that three key statements—Hawking radiation being in a pure state, information being emitted from near the horizon, and the infalling observer encountering nothing unusual—cannot all be true. They propose that the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon, or that novel dynamics, likely nonlocal, must extend a macroscopic distance from the horizon. The paper discusses various thought experiments and the implications of these findings, including the possibility of a firewall at the horizon. The authors also consider the extension of these arguments to higher partial waves and the relaxation of certain postulates, concluding that the only consistent scenarios involve either a firewall or novel dynamics that violate semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon.