How a New Black Hole Paradox Has Set the Physics World Ablaze
Wednesday, June 19, 2013 3:06
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by: Jennifer Ouellette
If a new hypothesis about black hole firewalls proves correct, at least one of three cherished notions in theoretical physics must be wrong.
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.
An illustration of a galaxy with a supermassive black hole shooting out jets of radio waves. (Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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.
Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the “P” in the “AMPS” team that presented a new hypothesis about black hole firewalls.
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 Hawking radiation is the result of virtual particle pairs popping into existence near the event horizon, with one partner falling in and the other escaping. The black hole’s mass decreases as a result and is emitted as radiation. (Illustration: Courtesy of Joseph Polchinski)
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.
The entanglement of particles in the No Drama scenario: Bob, outside the event horizon (dotted lines), is entangled with Alice just inside the event horizon, at point (b). Over time Alice (b’) drifts toward the singularity (squiggly line) while Bob (b”) remains outside the black hole. (Illustration: Courtesy of Joseph Polchinski)
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.
Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the “P” in the “AMPS” team that presented a new hypothesis about black hole firewalls.
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.
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This article was reprinted on ScientificAmerican.com.
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