2012/07/26 by Daniel Harlow, Harlow, Daniel · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #gr-qc #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1207.6243
Withdrawn because of a loophole in the argument of section 3 pointed out by D. Marolf
openalex publication_date 2012/07/26 · arxiv created 2012/08/09 · arxiv updated 2012/08/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this note I argue that a version of complementarity is possible which evades the need for the "firewalls" recently proposed by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to burn up observers falling into black hole horizons. In particular I claim that it is consistent for an infalling observer to fall through an "old" black hole horizon without burning up, without this observer or any other seeing information loss or a violation of low energy effective field theory in an unexpected place. The reason that AMPS find the opposite conclusion is because they attempt to use low energy physics to translate between the quantum mechanics of different observers rather than to describe the experiments of only a single observer; I argue that this translation is polluted by short-distance physics related to stretched horizons.