Related papers: Complementarity, not Firewalls
In recent work on black hole entropy in non-perturbative quantum gravity, an action for the black hole sector of the phase space is introduced and (partially) quantized. We give a number of observations on this and related works. In…
To what extent does the black hole information paradox lead to violations of quantum mechanics? I explain how black hole complementarity provides a framework to articulate how quantum characterizations of black holes can remain consistent…
We embed an object with a singular horizon structure, reminiscent of (but fundamentally different from, except in a limiting case) a black-hole event horizon, in an expanding, spherically symmetric, homogeneous, Universe that has a positive…
We follow the prevailing view that black holes do not destroy but rather process and release information in the form of Hawking radiation. By making certain conservative assumptions regarding the interior dynamics of the quantum system we…
Quantum information transfer necessary to reconcile black hole evaporation with quantum mechanics, while approximately preserving regular near-horizon geometry, can be simply parameterized in terms of couplings of the black hole internal…
The preeminent view that evaporating black holes should simply be smaller black holes has been challenged by the firewall paradox. In particular, this paradox suggests that something different occurs once a black hole has evaporated to…
We revisit our investigation of the claim of [1] that old black holes contain a firewall, i.e. an in-falling observer encounters highly excited states at a time much shorter than the light crossing time of the Schwarzschild radius. We used…
Black and white holes play remarkably contrasting roles in general relativity versus observational astrophysics. While there is overwhelming observational evidence for the existence of compact objects that are "cold, dark, and heavy", which…
We construct a model which illustrates the conjecture of fuzzball complementarity. In the fuzzball paradigm, the black hole microstates have no interior, and radiate unitarily from their surface through quanta of energy $E\sim T$. But…
Recently, several authors have studied the possibility of overspinning or overcharging an existing black hole to destroy its event horizon and make the central singularity naked. When all the effects are properly taken into account, any…
The cosmic censorship conjecture posits that singularities forming to the future of a regular Cauchy surface are hidden by an event horizon. Consequently any topological structures will ultimately collapse within the horizon of a set of…
Recently there has been much discussion as to whether old black holes have firewalls at their surfaces that would destroy infalling observers. Though I suspect that a proper handling of nonlocality in quantum gravity may show that firewalls…
The black hole firewall conjecture is based on Page curve hypothesis, which claims that entanglement between black hole and Hawking radiation is almost maximum. The hypothesis is inspired by Lubkin-Lloyd-Pagels-Page theorem for degenerate…
In an approach to quantum gravity where space-time arises from coarse graining of fundamentally discrete structures, black hole formation and subsequent evaporation can be described by a unitary evolution without the problems encountered by…
If a system falls through a black hole horizon, then its information is lost to an observer at infinity. But we argue that the {\it accessible} information is lost {\it before} the horizon is crossed. The temperature of the hole limits…
The AMPS firewall argument relies on treating early radiation, late outgoing Hawking modes, and interior partner modes as approximately independent quantum subsystems. In diffeomorphism-invariant quantum gravity, however, gravitational…
Black hole entropy has been shown by 't Hooft to diverge at the horizon. The region near the horizon is in a thermal state, so entropy is linear to energy which consequently also diverges. We find a similar divergence for the energy of the…
The radiation emitted by a black hole (BH) during its evaporation has to have some degree of quantum coherence to accommodate a unitary time evolution. We parametrize the degree of coherence by the number of coherently emitted particles…
A recent experiment performed by S. Afshar [first reported by M. Chown, New Scientist {\bf 183}, 30 (2004)] is analyzed. It was claimed that this experiment could be interpreted as a demonstration of a violation of the principle of…
Black hole complementarity has been well understood in spherically symmetric black holes. To study its validity for an accelerating Schwarzschild black hole, which has a preferred direction, we perform the thought experiment proposed by…