Related papers: Is Alice burning or fuzzing?
We comment on a recent paper of Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully who argue against black hole complementarity based on the claim that an infalling observer 'burns' as he approaches the horizon. We show that in fact measurements made…
In this note I argue that a version of complementarity is possible which evades the need for the "firewalls" recently proposed by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to burn up observers falling into black hole horizons. In particular I…
We investigate the recent black hole firewall argument. For a black hole in a typical state we argue that unitarity requires every quantum of radiation leaving the black hole to carry information about the initial state. An information-free…
Black hole complementarity, as originally formulated in the 1990's by Preskill, 't Hooft, and myself is now being challenged by the Almheiri-Marolf-Polchinski-Sully firewall argument. The AMPS argument relies on an implicit assumption---the…
Black holes offer an exciting area to explore the nature of quantum gravity. The classic work on Hawking radiation indicates that black holes should decay via quantum effects, but our ideas about how this might work at a technical level are…
Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully argued that, for a consistent black hole evaporation process, the horizon of a sufficiently old black hole should be replaced by a "firewall" at which an infalling observer burns up, which obviously…
If quantum gravity does not lead to a breakdown of predictability, then Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully (AMPS) have argued that an observer falling into a black hole can perform an experiment which verifies a violation of…
Black hole complementarity was a consensus among string theorists for the interpretation of the information loss problem. However, recently some authors find inconsistency of black hole complementarity: large N rescaling and AMPS argument.…
The past year has seen an explosion of new and old ideas about black hole physics. Prior to the firewall paper, the dominant picture was the thermofield model apparently implied by ADS/CFT duality\cite{mal2}. While some seek a narrow…
Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully, recently claimed that once a black hole has radiated more than half its initial entropy (the Page time), the horizon is replaced by a "firewall" at which infalling observers burn up, in apparent…
In this paper, we discuss the black hole complementarity and the firewall proposal at length. Black hole complementarity is inevitable if we assume the following five things: unitarity, entropy-area formula, existence of an information…
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…
In this paper we discuss quantum computational restrictions on the types of thought experiments recently used by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to argue against the smoothness of black hole horizons. We argue that the quantum…
A lot of confusion surrounds the issue of black hole complementarity, because the question has been considered without discussing the mechanism which guarantees unitarity. Considering such a mechanism leads to the following: (1) The Hawking…
Recently, Almheiri et. al. argued, via a delicate thought experiment, that it is not consistent to simultaneosuly require that (a) Hawking radiation is pure, (b) effective field theory is valid outside a stretched horizon and (c) infalling…
Recently, it has been argued that black hole complementarity is inconsistent by showing that, for an infalling observer, it would lead to the existence of a firewall near the black hole horizon, thereby violating the equivalence principle.…
Black hole complementarity plays a pivotal role in resolving the information loss paradox by treating Hawking radiation as carriers of information, apart from the complicated mechanisms involved in decoding information from this radiation.…
In the fuzzball paradigm the information paradox is resolved because the black hole is replaced by an object with no horizon. One may therefore ask if observations can distinguish a traditional hole from a fuzzball. We find: (a) It is very…
Black Holes are unique objects which allow for meaningful theoretical studies of strong gravity and even quantum gravity effects. An infalling and a distant observer would have very different views on the structure of the world. However, a…
The AMPS paradox challenges black hole complementarity by apparently constructing a way for an observer to bring information from the outside of the black hole into its interior if there is no drama at its horizon, making manifest a…