Swan Song for Black Holes?

According to an article in the upcoming issue of New Scientist , black holes may not exist! Not that anyone has really seen one, what with the Schwartzchild radius problem and all that. The new theory proposes that instead of massive stars collapsing into quantum singularities, they instead form a quantum critical shell, after the star's matter undergoes "quantum critical phase transition." You can read the article here: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-03/ns-tce030806.php

Where does this leave SF writers who have been using black holes as part of the cosmos for years? The writers of the above article say that this theory may be proved in 5 years or so, but SF writers, especially the hard SF writers, like to be on the cutting edge of things (or perhaps we should say the "on quantum critical phase boundary"), so some of this cool new science could be appearing in story or novel real soon.

This reminds me of some of the old SF stories I have read from before the Golden Age (pre 1940's or so). Every now and then you see the word "universe" when they probably mean "galaxy". But back then there was a huge debate on just how big the universe was, and whether other galaxies even existed. For a long time other galaxies where called stuff like "island nebulas," or thought to be just gas clouds. So many the writers just didn't know the difference between galaxy and universe, or didn't believe the latest "cutting edge theory!"

One of Ed Hamilton's stories ("Haunted Galaxy," IIRC) uses the idea of not only other galaxies, but also the expansion of the universe. The story's good, but it wasn't until later that I realized that this story, which I thought of at the time as a little bit dated, was cutting edge in its day.