Famed physicist Stephen Hawking says, 'There are no black holes'

End of world is near.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking surely knew the quote in the headline above would be the part of his new paper that would get the most attention. In fact, the full context makes it a little less dramatic:

The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.

OK, so many of us know the basic idea of an "event horizon" -- an invisible boundary of a black hole that traps everything beyond it, even light. People wouldn't notice passing the event horizon (although the black hole's gravity would stretch them out and ultimately crush them).

But, in 2012, physicist Joseph Polchinski and his team argued that the laws of quantum mechanics would, according to an account the Journal Nature, "turn the event horizon into a seething maelstrom of particles. Anyone who fell into it would hit a wall of fire and be burned to a crisp in an instant."

The problem is that this would violate Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, under which people should perceive the laws of physics as being the same no matter where they are.

Enter Hawking and his "apparent horizon," which is "a surface along which light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be suspended," according to a new Nature article. In general, the trapped light would be held at the apparent horizon indefinitely. But there are circumstances under which stuff trapped in the black hole could escape.

That said, what escaped "would be highly scrambled so that, as it is released through Hawking radiation, it would be in a vastly different form, making it almost impossible to work out what the swallowed objects once were," Nature wrote.