Never let it be said that Nature does not address the science questions that are on the lips of researchers. On page 20, a News Feature poses the conundrum: will an astronaut who falls into a black hole be crushed or burned to a crisp? The answer, according to the disappointing end to the Disney film The Black Hole (Gary Nelson; 1979) is neither: the astronaut will go on a psychedelic trip through a (possibly metaphorical) hell and heaven. The answer according to physicists in 2013 is even more of a let-down: they don’t know.

The European particle-physics laboratory CERN, located near Geneva in Switzerland, has had a mixed experience with black holes: various challenges to its Large Hadron Collider over the years have focused on the (very small) chance that it could create (very small) black holes that would destroy the world. So the CERN press office must have looked on nervously as physicists gathered there last month to address the mysterious fate of our unfortunate astronaut. There is more at stake than the grisly demise of a single free-floating space traveller. The physics is complicated but the take-home message is this: if the astronaut fries, then Einstein’s framework of general relativity goes up in smoke with it; if the astronaut is crushed and torn by the black hole’s internal variation in gravity, then quantum mechanics is wrong.

So which is it, relativity or quantum theory; heaven or hell? Debate continues. One compromise has the astronaut hang around outside the black hole to hoover up some quantum information as it leaks, use it to do some maths and then jump in to see if either theory is right. So far so good (for the laws of physics if not the astronaut, who perishes either way) except that the maths is so difficult that, by the time scientists have an answer, the black hole will have evaporated beneath them. Now that would make for a better ending, at least for the astronaut. Disney, which is said to be remaking its film, should take note.