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What’s on the Surface of a Black Hole?

posted by martyb on Thursday June 18 2015, @11:27AM   
from the two-steps-forward-and-there's-no-turning-back dept.

AnonTechie writes:

Are black holes the ruthless killers we’ve made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at Ohio State University, the recently-proposed idea that black holes have “firewalls” that destroy all they touch has a loophole.

In a paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, Mathur takes issue with the firewall theory, and proves mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom. In fact, he says the world could be captured by a black hole, and we wouldn’t even notice.

More than a decade ago, Mathur used the principles of string theory to show that black holes are actually tangled-up balls of cosmic strings. His “fuzzball theory” helped resolve certain contradictions in how physicists think of black holes.

But when a group of researchers recently tried to build on Mathur’s theory, they concluded that the surface of the fuzzball was actually a firewall.

According to the firewall theory, the surface of the fuzzball is deadly. In fact, the idea is called the firewall theory because it suggests that a very literal fiery death awaits anything that touches it.

Mathur and his team have been expanding on their fuzzball theory, too, and they’ve come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort.

https://news.osu.edu/news/2015/06/16/​fuzzyhologram/

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Original Submission

• Re:What’s on the Surface of a Black Hole? Re:What’s on the Surface of a Black Hole? (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 18 2015, @11:36AM

  by c0lo (156) on Thursday June 18 2015, @11:36AM (#197756) Journal

  I just read the abstract. I don't know now which of the two I hate the most: the abstract or goatsie. You be the judge:

  We construct a model which illustrates the conjecture of fuzzball complementarity. In the fuzzball paradigm, the black hole microstates have no interior, and radiate unitarily from their surface through quanta of energy E∼T. But quanta with E≫T impinging on the fuzzball create large collective excitations of the fuzzball surface. The dynamics of such excitations must be studied as an evolution in superspace, the space of all fuzzball solution |Fi⟩. The states in this superspace are arranged in a hierarchy of `complexity'. We argue that evolution towards higher complexity maps, through a duality analogous to AdS/CFT, to infall inside the horizon of the traditional hole. We explain how the large degeneracy of fuzzball states leads to a breakdown of the principle of equivalence at the threshold of horizon formation. We recall that the firewall argument did not invoke the limit E≫T when considering a complementary picture; on the contrary it focused on the dynamics of the E∼T modes which contribute to Hawking radiation. This loophole allows the dual description conjectured in fuzzball complementarity.

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  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:What’s on the Surface of a Black Hole? (Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday June 18 2015, @02:34PM

  by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Thursday June 18 2015, @02:34PM (#197815) Journal

  the abstract or goatsie

  I sense the birth of a new prank here à la
  Check out this exclusive pics of Product XY [arxiv.org]

  Parent