• JackSarfatti's comment on A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox via @nytimes http://t.co/I671P9aoP3 1 of 2
    A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox
    nyti.ms
    A paradox around matter leaking from black holes puts into question various scientific axioms: Either information can be lost; Einstein’s principle of equivalence is wrong; or quantum field theory needs fixing.
  • Jack SarfattiActually I was the first to propose a connection between gravity wormholes and quantum entanglement back in the early 1970's when I was at Abdus Salam's Institute in Trieste, Italy. The idea is explicit in the zany book Space-Time and Beyond (Dutton, 1975) that I co-authored with New Age artist Bob Toben and physicist Fred Alan Wolf. MIT Professor David Kaiser describes this history in his award winning book "How the Hippies Saved Physics." Curious that this article thinks that traversable wormholes are impossible. Many physicists think otherwise. Traversable wormholes held open by gravitationally repulsive exotic dark energy without horizons would of course permit faster-than-light communication via entanglement in violation of orthodox quantum theory. Indeed, Antony Valentini has written papers on such signal nonlocality using David Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory when the "beables" are not in thermal equilibirium.
  • Jack SarfattiThe black hole horizon is already quite physical without violating Einstein's equivalence principle for the hovering observer who must have an increasingly large proper acceleration the closer he gets to the horizon. By the Unruh effect, the hovering observer Bob sees a large temperature of real thermal photons. If Bob burns up from hovering too close to the horizon, and if Alice free falls into the black hole in close contact with Bob, then it seems plausible that Alice will feel Bob's heat and indeed catch fire herself. Furthermore, the virtual electron-positron pairs stuck to the horizon in Hawking's radiation mechanism will also feel the photon heat high temperature and will get enough energy from the gravity field to excite into a real electron positron plasma within a Compton wavelength thickness, so that free-falling Alice should see that as a quantum firewall. The equivalence principle is a classical physics idea prior to quantum corrections. Hence, I see no real paradox if looked at from this perspective.