English

Excluding Black Hole Firewalls with Extreme Cosmic Censorship

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-16 v5

Abstract

The AMPS argument for black hole firewalls seems to arise not only from the assumption of local effective field theory outside the stretched horizon but also from an overcounting of internal black hole states that include states that are singular in the past. Here I propose to exclude such singular states by Extreme Cosmic Censorship (the conjectured principle that the universe is entirely nonsingular, except for transient singularities inside black and/or white holes). I argue that the remaining set of nonsingular realistic states do not have firewalls but yet preserve information in Hawking radiation from black holes that form from nonsingular initial states.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1306.0562,
  title  = {Excluding Black Hole Firewalls with Extreme Cosmic Censorship},
  author = {Don N. Page},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.0562},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

23 pages, LaTeX, more minor revisions, quotes from Hawking, references added in response to comments by referees and colleagues and from new citations to AMPS, and additions to the acknowledgments