1207.4090 (Leonard Susskind)

Complementarity And Firewalls    [PDF]

Leonard Susskind

Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully, recently reported a remarkable and very surprising phenomenon involving old black holes. The authors argue that after a black hole has radiated more than half its initial entropy, the horizon is replaced by a "firewall" at which infalling observers burn up, in apparent violation of one of the postulates of black hole complementarity. In this note I will give a different interpretation of the firewall phenomenon in which the properties of the horizon are conventional, but the dynamics of the singularity are strongly modified. In this formulation the postulates of complementarity are left intact. But the reader is nevertheless warned: black holes could be more dangerous than you thought.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.4090