Singularities, Firewalls, and Complementarity

Abstract

Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully, recently claimed that once a black hole has radiated more than half its initial entropy (the Page time), the horizon is replaced by a "firewall" at which infalling observers burn up, in apparent violation of the equivalence principle and the postulates of black hole complementarity. In this paper I review the arguments for firewalls, and give a slightly different interpretation of them. According to this interpretation the horizon has standard properties, but the singularity is non-standard. The growing entanglement of the black hole with Hawking radiation causes the singularity to migrate toward the horizon, and eventually intersect it at the page time. The resulting collision of the singularity with the horizon leads to the firewall. Complementarity applies to the horizon and not to the singular firewall. Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully conjecture that firewalls form much earlier then the Page time; namely at the scrambling time. I argue that there is no reason to believe this generalization, and good reason to think it is wrong. For most of this paper I will assume that the firewall argument is correct. In the last section before the conclusion I will describe reasons for having reservations.

28 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems
• Information in Black Hole Radiation
• The Stretched Horizon and Black Hole Complementarity
• The Gravity Dual of a Density Matrix
• Gedanken Experiments involving Black Holes
• Complementarity Is Not Enough
• Rindler Quantum Gravity
• Black Holes and Beyond
• Is the Black Hole Complementarity principle really necessary?
• Complementarity, not Firewalls

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