Related papers: Firewall or smooth horizon?
In this note I introduce the notion of the ``reliability horizon'' for semi-classical quantum gravity. This reliability horizon is an attempt to quantify the extent to which we should trust semi-classical quantum gravity, and to get a…
This is a review of my work published in the papers [1-4]. It offers a more detailed discussion of the results than what was given in the published papers and it links my results to some conclusions recently made by other people. It also…
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…
The ``reliability horizon'' for semi-classical quantum gravity quantifies the extent to which we should trust semi-classical quantum gravity, and gives a handle on just where the ``Planck regime'' resides. The key obstruction to pushing…
The firewall paradox is often presented as arising from double entanglement, but I argue that more generally the paradox is double purity. Near-horizon modes are purified by the interior, in the infalling vacuum. Hence they cannot also be…
The composition as well as the very existence of the interior of a Schwarzschild black hole (BH) remains at the forefront of open problems in fundamental physics. To address this issue, we turn to Hawking's "principle of ignorance", which…
Event horizons are the defining feature of classical black holes. They are the key ingredient of the information loss paradox which, as paradoxes in quantum foundations, is built on a combination of predictions of quantum theory and…
The concept of transparent and opaque horizons is defined. One example of opaqueness is the presence of a firewall. Two apparently contradictory statements are reconciled: The overwhelming number of black hole states have opaque horizons;…
If a black hole (BH) is initially in an approximately pure state and it evaporates by a unitary process, then the emitted radiation will be in a highly quantum state. As the purifier of this radiation, the state of the BH interior must also…
The near-horizon field B of an old black hole is maximally entangled with the early Hawking radiation R, by unitarity of the S-matrix. But B must be maximally entangled with the black hole interior A, by the equivalence principle. Causal…
The gravitational force harbours a fundamental instability against collapse. In standard General Relativity without Quantum Mechanics, this implies the existence of black holes as natural, stable solutions of Einstein's equations. If one…
Within a semiclassical framework, we investigate spherically symmetric solutions of the Einstein equations that (i) develop a trapped region within a finite time as measured by distant observers, and (ii) remain sufficiently regular at the…
Several anomalies of black hole thermodynamics are resolved if one accepts hints from semi classical theory that in regions of strong gravity the energy density of the vacuum can become substantially negative. This leads to a picture of the…
Isolated horizons are a quasi-local framework, developed over the last 15 years by many authors, for modeling black holes `in equilibrium' that involves assumptions only about geometric structures intrinsic to the horizon. We review the…
We describe two different, but equivalent semiclassical views of black hole physics in which the equivalence principle and unitarity are both accommodated. In one, unitarity is built-in, while the black hole interior emerges only…
It was recently argued by Almheiri et al that black hole complementarity strains the basic rules of quantum information theory, such as monogamy of entanglement. Motivated by this argument, we develop a practical framework for describing…
In classical General Relativity (GR), an observer falling into an astrophysical black hole is not expected to experience anything dramatic as she crosses the event horizon. However, tentative resolutions to problems in quantum gravity, such…
The black hole information paradox forces us into a strange situation: we must find a way to break the semiclassical approximation in a domain where no quantum gravity effects would normally be expected. Traditional quantizations of gravity…
Interest in the black hole information paradox has recently been catalyzed by the newer "firewall" argument. The crux of the updated argument is that previous solutions which relied on observer complementarity are in violation of the…
We propose here that the well-known black hole paradoxes such as the information loss and teleological nature of the event horizon are restricted to a particular idealized case, which is the homogeneous dust collapse model. In this case,…