Black hole fundamental laws

Question

As the Laws of physics breakdown during inside a black hole, would we have to create new fundamental Laws?

Answer 1

The laws of physics don’t break down as soon as you cross the event horizon and enter the black hole. We can predict what happens inside. The laws only break down when you reach the singularity. This is presumably because General Relativity is classical doesn’t take quantum mechanics into account. An eventual theory of quantum gravity hopefully will not have singularities.

Answer 2

Kind of.

The locus classicus of this figure of thought is Bekensteins Gedanken experiment as outlined in Susskinds popular book on black holes where he finds a theoretical justification for establishing a notion of entropy for black holes. A semi-classical calculation by Hawking, which he actually began to prove Bekenstein wrong, actually turned out to prove the converse, that he appeared to be correct.

This has then been used as a crucible to test theories of quantum gravity. The main argument here being given that entropy is defined through micro-states. What then are micro-states in a black hole, when classically speaking they have ‘no hair’, that is they have no distinguishing qualities apart from their momenta, charge and mass? Both LQG and String Theory have given answers here. So in a sense, black holes are being used to test for new, speculative physical laws.

Given also, that we seem to have reached the limit for terrestrial colliders in terms of size, energy and cost, I’d speculate that gravitational observatories are likely to be the future for testing of QG.

It’s probably only a coincidence that blackbody radiation was the main theoretical question that helped bring about the quantum revolution and its seems that this theoretical notion, in a very different context, may yet help us bring about a theory of quantum gravity.