Complementarity, not Firewalls

Abstract

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.

Withdrawn because of a loophole in the argument of section 3 pointed out by D. Marolf

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Jerusalem Lectures on Black Holes and Quantum Information
• Complementarity Is Not Enough
• Non-extremal Black Hole Microstates: Fuzzballs of Fire or Fuzzballs of Fuzz ?
• The Transfer of Entanglement: The Case for Firewalls
• Black Hole Complementarity and the Harlow-Hayden Conjecture
• Singularities, Firewalls, and Complementarity
• Is Alice burning or fuzzing?
• Firewall or smooth horizon?