eScholarship (California Digital Library)· 2013
Black holes: Complementarity or firewalls?
- 1,020citations
- 2013year
Short summary
A highly cited 2013 paper argues that Hawking radiation being in a pure state, information being emitted near the horizon with low-energy effective field theory valid nearby, and an infalling observer encountering nothing unusual at the horizon are mutually exclusive. The authors propose the 'firewall' hypothesis, where infalling observers burn up at the horizon, as a potential resolution.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Three fundamental statements about black holes (pure state Hawking radiation, information emission near horizon with valid low-energy EFT, and no unusual experience for infalling observers) are shown to be contradictory.
- The paper proposes the 'firewall' hypothesis: infalling observers are destroyed at the event horizon.
- Alternative resolutions to this paradox would require significant violations of semiclassical physics at macroscopic scales.
- The work highlights a deep tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity in the context of black holes.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
We argue that the following three statements cannot all be true: (i) Hawking radiation is in a pure state, (ii) the information carried by the radiation is emitted from the region near the horizon, with low energy effective field theory valid beyond some microscopic distance from the horizon, and (iii) the infalling observer encounters nothing unusual at the horizon. Perhaps the most conservative resolution is that the infalling observer burns up at the horizon. Alternatives would seem to require novel dynamics that nevertheless cause notable violations of semiclassical physics at macroscopic distances from the horizon. © 2013 SISSA.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. eScholarship (California Digital Library), 2013 · DOI ↗
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Field: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Nuclear and High Energy PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy