Black Hole Firewalls Confound Theoretical Physicists

From Simons Science News (find original story here).

Alice and Bob, beloved characters of various thought experiments in quantum mechanics, are at a crossroads. The adventurous, rather reckless Alice jumps into a very large black hole, leaving a presumably forlorn Bob outside the event horizon ? a black hole?s point of no return, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.

Conventionally, physicists have assumed that if the black hole is large enough, Alice won?t notice anything unusual as she crosses the horizon. In this scenario, colorfully dubbed ?No Drama,? the gravitational forces won?t become extreme until she approaches a point inside the black hole called the singularity. There, the gravitational pull will be so much stronger on her feet than on her head that Alice will be ?spaghettified.?

Now a new hypothesis is giving poor Alice even more drama than she bargained for. If this alternative is correct, as the unsuspecting Alice crosses the event horizon, she will encounter a massive wall of fire that will incinerate her on the spot. As unfair as this seems for Alice, the scenario would also mean that at least one of three cherished notions in theoretical physics must be wrong.

When Alice?s fiery fate was proposed this summer, it set off heated debates among physicists, many of whom were highly skeptical. ?My initial reaction was, ?You?ve got to be kidding,?? admitted Raphael Bousso, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. He thought a forceful counterargument would quickly emerge and put the matter to rest. Instead, after a flurry of papers debating the subject, he and his colleagues realized that this had the makings of a mighty fine paradox.

The ?Menu From Hell?
Paradoxes in physics have a way of clarifying key issues. At the heart of this particular puzzle lies a conflict between three fundamental postulates beloved by many physicists. The first, based on the equivalence principle of general relativity, leads to the No Drama scenario: Because Alice is in free fall as she crosses the horizon, and there is no difference between free fall and inertial motion, she shouldn?t feel extreme effects of gravity. The second postulate is unitarity, the assumption, in keeping with a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics, that information that falls into a black hole is not irretrievably lost. Lastly, there is what might be best described as ?normality,? namely, that physics works as expected far away from a black hole even if it breaks down at some point within the black hole ? either at the singularity or at the event horizon.

Together, these concepts make up what Bousso ruefully calls ?the menu from hell.? To resolve the paradox, one of the three must be sacrificed, and nobody can agree on which one should get the ax.

Physicists don?t lightly abandon time-honored postulates. That?s why so many find the notion of a wall of fire downright noxious. ?It is odious,? John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology declared earlier this month at an informal workshop organized by Stanford University?s Leonard Susskind. For two days, 50 or so physicists engaged in a spirited brainstorming session, tossing out all manner of crazy ideas to try to resolve the paradox, punctuated by the rapid-fire?tap-tap-tap?of equations being scrawled on a blackboard. But despite the collective angst, even the firewall?s fiercest detractors have yet to find a satisfactory solution to the conundrum.

According to Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the simplest solution is that the equivalence principle breaks down at the event horizon, thereby giving rise to a firewall. Polchinski is a co-author of?the paper that started it all, along with Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf and James Sully ? a group often referred to as ?AMPS.? Even Polchinski thinks the idea is a little crazy. It?s a testament to the knottiness of the problem that a firewall is the least radical potential solution.

If there is an error in the firewall argument, the mistake is not obvious. That?s the hallmark of a good scientific paradox. And it comes at a time when theorists are hungry for a new challenge: The Large Hadron Collider has?failed to turn up any data?hinting at exotic physics beyond the Standard Model. ?In the absence of data, theorists thrive on paradox,? Polchinski quipped.

If AMPS is wrong,?according to Susskind, it is wrong in a really interesting way that will push physics forward, hopefully toward a robust theory of quantum gravity. Black holes are interesting to physicists, after all, because both general relativity and quantum mechanics can apply, unlike in the rest of the universe, where objects are governed by quantum mechanics at the subatomic scale and by general relativity on the macroscale. The two ?rule books? work well enough in their respective regimes, but physicists would love to combine them to shed light on anomalies like black holes and, by extension, the origins of the universe.

An Entangled Paradox
The issues are complicated and subtle ? if they were simple, there would be no paradox ? but a large part of the AMPS argument hinges on the notion of monogamous quantum entanglement: You can only have one kind of entanglement at a time. AMPS argues that two different kinds of entanglement are needed in order for all three postulates on the ?menu from hell? to be true. Since the rules of quantum mechanics don?t allow you to have both entanglements, one of the three postulates must be sacrificed.

Entanglement ? which Albert Einstein ridiculed as ?spooky action at a distance? ? is a well-known feature of quantum mechanics (in the thought experiment, Alice and Bob represent an entangled particle pair). When subatomic particles collide, they can become invisibly connected, though they may be physically separated. Even at a distance, they are inextricably interlinked and act like a single object. So knowledge about one partner can instantly reveal knowledge about the other. The catch is that you can only have one entanglement at a time.

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