Black Hole Firewall Incinerator Will Kill Instantly, Study Shows

[n2doc]

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A purely hypothetical scenario has threatened the very core of physics by pitting Albert Einstein's long-standing theory of general relativity against the principals of quantum mechanics and string theory.

The scenario is as amusing as it is morbid: if an astronaut were to fall into a black hole what would happen?
Obviously death would occur. But how the astronaut dies has fired an intense debate in the physics community.

The old line of thinking went that the astronaut would not feel anything out of the ordinary at first, even as he passed the point of no return: the black hole's event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing can escape. But as he falls ever downward into the back hole he would eventually be ripped apart by the effects of powerful gravitational forces.

But, as the journal Nature reports, a string theorist from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif. has a different solution. Based on his calculations, Joseph Polchinski thinks that the event horizon is a seething firewall that would instantly incinerate anything that fell into it.

more
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1229/20130405/black-hole-firewall-incinerator-will-kill-instantly-study-shows-challenging.htm

[longship]

1. Spaghettification!

You cannot post about an astronaut falling into a black hole without mentioning spaghettification.

Nota bene: this has nothing whatsoever to do with pirates or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Although I hear it on high authority that Pastafarians are huge proponents of the spaghettification theory.

Arrrrgh! Mates!

[formercia]

3. Ramen n/t

[zbdent]

2. Most likely, unless he's travelling faster than the speed of light,

I'd suspect he'd die of, in this order:

oxygen deprivation
dehydration
hunger
old age

before being "torn to bits" ...

[Trajan]

4. No no no ..... It's tidal force that would kill him ...

The gravitational differential between the head and feet (assuming a head down angle of flight) would be great enough (in the intense gravitational field close-in to a black hole) to pull the body apart through tidal force alone .... and since human beings stop being human beings when they get pulled apart, the spaghettification aspect would be a moot point: The astronaut would be in pieces just as the actual spaghettification begins ....

It is my understanding that the body would disintegrate before it reaches the event horizon, the pieces forming long spaghetti-like streams as it descends towards the singularity, and so therefore would already be dead before it reaches the 'seething firewall' of the event horizon ....

EDIT: Here is what Neil DeGrasse Tyson has to say about it ...

[sofa king]

5. String theory is just like God.

It has to hide in the cracks of our knowledge, beyond measurement, beyond those places where we can actually go, always just beyond perception and practical application.

You watch, if those folks can't find a way to make a measurable experiment or observation soon, they're going to start their own religion.

[Jim__]

6. A string theorist did the computations, but the paradox is between quantum theory and relativity.

The failure may not, now, be testable, but either quantum theory or relativity breaks down mathematically. From the article in nature:

...

But how could that be, wondered the Polchinski’s team? For a particle to be emitted at all, it has to be entangled with the twin that is sacrificed to the black hole. And if Susskind and others were right, it also had to be entangled with all the Hawking radiation emitted before it. Yet a rigorous result of quantum mechanics dubbed ‘the monogamy of entanglement’ says that one quantum system cannot be fully entangled with two independent systems at once.

To escape this paradox, Polchinski and his co-workers realized, one of the entanglement relationships had to be severed. Reluctant to abandon the one required to encode information in the Hawking radiation, they decided to snip the link binding an escaping Hawking particle to its infalling twin. But there was a cost. “It’s a violent process, like breaking the bonds of a molecule, and it releases energy,” says Polchinski. The energy generated by severing lots of twins would be enormous. “The event horizon would literally be a ring of fire that burns anyone falling through,” he says. And that, in turn, violates the equivalence principle and its assertion that free-fall should feel the same as floating in empty space — impossible when the former ends in incineration. So they posted a paper on the preprint server, arXiv, presenting physicists with a stark choice: either accept that firewalls exist and that general relativity breaks down, or accept that information is lost in black holes and quantum mechanics is wrong1. “For us, firewalls seem like the least crazy option, given that choice,” says Marolf.

The paper rocked the physics community. “It was outrageous to claim that giving up Einstein’s equivalence principle is the best option,” says Jacobson. Bousso agrees, adding: “A firewall simply can’t appear in empty space, any more than a brick wall can suddenly appear in an empty field and smack you in the face.” If Einstein’s theory doesn’t apply at the event horizon, cosmologists would have to question whether it fully applies anywhere.

...

Since then, more than 40 papers have been posted on the topic in arXiv, but as yet, nobody has found a flaw in the team’s logic. “It’s a really beautiful argument proving that there’s something inconsistent in our thinking about black holes,” says Don Page, a collaborator of Hawking’s during the 1970s who is now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. A number of inventive solutions have been offered, however.

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