How the Black Hole Firewall Paradox Was Resolved

Stephen Hawking's recent comments about the nature of black holes have bred uncertainty about physics concepts that were relatively well understood. This article from astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains that yes, black holes still exist, and how a group of three academic papers answered the black hole 'firewall' paradox. Quoting: "... And so what these three papers, in tandem, have done, is demonstrate that there is no firewall and that the resolution to the firewall paradox is that the first assumption, that Hawking radiation is in a pure state, is the one that's flawed. You won't read about this in the popular write-ups because it doesn't have a catchy headline, it's complex, and it's not work by someone that's already very famous for other work. But it's right. Hawking radiation is not in a pure state, and without that pure state, there's no firewall, and no paradox. There is still an incredible amount to learn and understand about black holes, event horizons, and the behavior of quantum systems in strongly curved spacetime, to be sure, and there's lots of very interesting research ahead. These findings arguably raise more questions than they answer, although at least we know that black holes won't fry you when you fall in; it will still be death by spaghettification, not by incineration!"

Comments

Re:I always thought...

[wisnoskij]

The problem with that is that black holes need the mass they suck in to exist.

The mass cannot both be in the black hole and shot out the other side into a new universe.

So unless you can come up with a theory that has black holes creating mass out of nothing, that is simply impossible.

Re:I always thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. A cosmological model is a foliation of maximally-symmetric spacelike hypersurfaces. A black hole is not maximally-symmetric. A black hole is a non-evolving system -- it possesses at least one timelike Killing vector -- and a cosmological system is the exact opposite, an evolving system that has no timelike Killing vector. The only real similarity is that a black hole (as you're doubtless meaning it; a Schwarzschild solution) is spherically symmetric, and the spacelike slices in a cosmological spacetime are also spherically symmetric. But so is flat Minkowski space, and so are Tolman-Bondi spaces.

Re: I always thought...

[wisnoskij]

There is some debate exactly what happens when you get enough mass together to tie space-time into knots. The most important part of a black hole is really the event horizon, which is the point X distance from the center of mass of a black hole where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape. The original idea was that is was a very static place, a perfect circle.

There is a bunch of different problems with this. Because in this universe we have the idea that mass, energy, and information cannot be lost. Something cannot just go into a black box and all knowledge of it is lost, because then information would then of been lost.

Stephen hawking's has just come forward with the idea that it is a far more stormy area with fluctuating gravity. Which would allow this information to escape. Previously the idea was Hawking radiation, which would allow things to escape from the black whole even without fluctuation gravity.

One of the problems of with the horizon, that someone just proposed, was that it would be so tumultuous at the edge that everything would be burned beyond recognition,. This article is about how stuff entering a BH would NOT in fact be burned beyond recognition.