Scientists fight over what would happen if you fell into a black hole.

Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford, says: "It's kind of like you're rowing on Niagara Falls, and you pass the point [where] you can't row fast enough to escape the current... Well, you're doomed at that point. But passing the point of no return — you wouldn't even notice it."

Now you can't get out. And gravity from the black hole is starting to pull on your feet more than your head. "The gravity wants to sort of stretch you in one direction and squeeze you in another," says Joe Polchinski, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He says the technical term for this stretching is spaghettification.

There is, by the way, a technical term for attributing mental processes to things that have no mind, which Polchinski is doing when he says: "The gravity wants to" do something is. It's: the pathetic fallacy. It's not scientific, obviously, but scientists often get colorful and poetic:

"It'd be kind of medieval," says Polchinkski. "It'd be like something on Game of Thrones."

See? Anyway, here's the dispute:

According to the dominant theory of physics — quantum mechanics — information can never disappear from the universe.... This rule is absolutely fundamental. "Everything is built on it," says Susskind. "If it were violated, everything falls apart."...

And Polchinski and his colleagues found one way to keep things from vanishing when they fall inside a black hole — they got rid of the inside....

So in Polchinski's version, when you fall into a black hole, you don't disappear. Instead, you smack into the end of the universe.

"You just come to the end of space, and there's nothing beyond it. Terminated," Susskind says. All the information once contained in your atoms is re-radiated in a quantum mechanical fire.... "I don't think this is true," he says. "In fact, I think almost nobody thinks this is true — that space falls apart inside a black hole."