1207.6243 (Daniel Harlow)

Complementarity, not Firewalls    [PDF]

Daniel Harlow

In this note I argue that a strict interpretation 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 argue 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 away from a stretched horizon. 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. The validity of this position is tested by two concrete calculations.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.6243