http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.3055
One of the most spectacular predictions of the general theory of relativity is the black hole, an object that plays a central role in modern physics [1,2,3] and astrophysics [4,5]. Black holes are, however, plagued by fundamental paradoxes that remain unresolved to this day. First, the black hole event horizon is teleological in nature [6], which means that we need to know the entire future space-time of the universe to determine the current location of the horizon. This is essentially impossible. Second, any information carried by infalling matter is lost once the material falls through the event horizon. Even though the black hole may later evaporate by emitting Hawking radiation [7], the lost information does not reappear, which has the rather serious and disturbing consequence that quantum unitarity is violated [8]. Here we propose that the above paradoxes are restricted to a particular idealized model of collapse first studied in the 1930s [9, 10] in which the event horizon, which defines the boundary of the black hole, forms initially, and the singularity in the interior of the black hole forms at a later time. In contrast, gravitational collapse from more reasonable and/or physically more realistic initial conditions often leads to models in which the event horizon and the singularity form simultaneously. We show that this apparently simple modification mitigates the causality and teleological paradoxes and at the same time lends support to two recently proposed solutions to the information paradox, namely, the “firewall” [11] and “classical chaos” [12].
P. Joshi and R. Narayan
Fri, 14 Feb 14
18/42
You must be logged in to post a comment.