Questions tagged [black-hole-firewall]

A firewall is a proposed solution to the black hole information paradox that resolves an apparent issue with black hole complementarity. The firewall hypothesis predicts a "wall" of energy at the event horizon that will engulf an in-falling observer.

A firewall is a proposed solution to the black hole information paradox that resolves an apparent issue with black hole complementarity. The firewall hypothesis predicts a "wall" of energy at the event horizon that will engulf an in-falling observer.

External Resources

The original paper by Almheiri, et al proposing the existence of firewalls is available on the ArXiv.

51 questions
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What happened to the black hole firewall theory?

What happened to the black hole firewall theory? Back in 2012, some physicists apparently came up with strong evidence that one of three things must be wrong for black holes to work the way we thought they did: Unitarity the Equivalence Principle…
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Isn't gravity non-local and non-causal?

The way I think of this is that, I can ask physical questions about a space-time which are impossible to answer unless one knows the full space-time, and hence I am inclined to believe that gravity is non-local. For example, sitting at a point in a…
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Is the firewall paradox really a paradox?

The firewall paradox is a very hot topic at the moment (1207.3123v4). Everyone who is anybody in theoretical physics seems to be jumping into the action (Maldacena, Polchinski, Susskind to name a few). However, I am unable to see the paradox. To me…
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Information Preservation and Burning Books

I recently read an article in the NY Times called A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox. I really liked the article, but reading one quote immediately made me think of asking Physics.SE a question: From the material in the smoke and…
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How does Hawking radiation emerge from the shadows?

Imagine you have a large black hole, onto which you drop a small object. This object could have any shape you like, but later on it will look like a thin sheet, so we could imagine it starts that way, too. The important properties are that it it’s…
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What are cosmological "firewalls"?

Reading the funny title of this talk, Black Holes and Firewalls, just made me LOL because I have no idea what it is about but a lively imagination :-P (Sorry Raphael Bousso but the title is just too excessively funny). Since this was a session talk…
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Do black holes have transient color charge?

In the membrane model, when a baryon hits the event horizon its spatially separated quarks will impact the membrane at different times. Doesn't this necessarily mean that black holes acquire, however transiently, color charge? That is, in addition…
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What is the physical interpretation of the Papadodimas/Raju mirror operators?

In this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6335, the authors discuss the firewall problem and contruct so called mirror operators appearing in the correlation function. The key part seems to be (2.6) where the horizon correlator is computed (using…
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Is the new Hawking black hole all about photon launch angles?

The new Jan 2014 Hawking paper (arXiv:1401.5761v1) asserts on page 3: The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which…
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Situation after Saini & Stojkovic's paper on unitarity in gravitational collapse and non-formation of black holes?

In their paper, Anshul Saini and Dejan Stojkovic [1] claimed that by calculations it is possible to demonstrate that in a gravitational collapse of a disk, an event horizon is never made for a far observer. Some "radiation" is emitted in the moment…
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In principle, can energy "tunnel" directly out of a black hole? If not, why not?

Energy seems to quantum tunnel through normally impenetrable barriers, so I wonder why not the back side of an event horizon?
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What constitutes a blackhole firewall?

I understand that, to break the entanglement of two particles of Hawking radiation and therefore preserve monogamy of entanglement, there should be a firewall around the event horizon. This firewall is, essentially, high-energy quanta that is needed…
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Are there any known continuous (non-lattice) quantum error correction codes?

I come from a hep-th background, but I have noticed that quantum information is becoming increasingly common in discussions of AdS/CFT and black hole information, and so I've begun thinking about it lately. I'm heard much about the toric code and…
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Are Black Holes set to take over the Harmonic Oscillator in the 21st century?

A few years ago I attended a talk given by Andy Strominger entitled Black Holes- The Harmonic Oscillators of the 21st Century. This talk, http://media.physics.harvard.edu/video/?id=COLLOQ_STROMINGER_091310 was quite formidable and has had a lasting…
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Is it simply an assumption that spacetime fills the region under the event horizon?

For the black-hole solution of the Schwarzschild metric to be at all possible would require spacetime to fill the region under the event horizon. Is this requirement just an unspoken or unexamined assumption or is there some mathematical or…
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