ionelv | On the black hole information paradox and reality

I recently watched a Netflix doc on black hole-related parallel developments in 2017-2018: the Event Horizon Telescope and the collaboration over years between Hawking, Strominger, Perry and Haco (published as "Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair" not long after Stephen's death towards resolving the Black Hole Information Paradox).

More recently, in 2019, Penington et al have published an interesting paper: "Replica wormholes and the black hole interior". Musser published a review of this paper and other related papers (and historical background from Feynman in the 1940s leading up to it, e.g. Page Curve, quantum extremal surface, black hole island) in Quanta. My favorite part of this review are these quotes:

In some way or other, space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, implying that space-time is not the root level of reality, but an emergent structure from something deeper. 

[A] black hole rots from the outside in.

The authors dubbed the inner core of radiation the “island” and called its existence “surprising.” What does it mean for particles to be in the black hole, but not of the black hole?

Maldacena and Leonard Susskind of Stanford in 2013 [proposed] that quantum entanglement can be thought of as a wormhole. The wormhole, in turn, provides a secret tunnel through which information can escape the interior.

All this reinforces many physicists’ hunch that space-time is not the root level of nature, but instead emerges from some underlying mechanism that is not spatial or temporal.