Black Hole Firewalls and a Warning about Article Preamble

I was asked to comment upon a very interesting article about a recent revelation regarding Black Hole Firewalls, whilst doing so I could not help noticing the context in which the article had been written due to the article’s preamble. The preamble, in a nutshell, informs the reader that the article touches upon a theory which may or may not be true; but if true, will undermine at least one of the fundamental laws of physics. I strongly believe everyone should all be on the lookout for preamble such as this, as the context of article’s content is dramatically more or less concrete as a consequence. The article I was asked to comment upon was entitled ‘Black Hole Firewalls Confound Theoretical Physicists’ and may be seen here : http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=black-hole-firewalls-confound-theoretical-physicists One of my favourite books of all time was ‘The Whole Shebang‘, by Timothy Ferris; this book enabled me to

The Whole Shebang

explore within my mind, extrapolate new ideas and develop potential new concepts. This type of study acts as a mental gymnasium and makes watching television soaps look like an Alien Master-plan to numb the minds of every human; I genuinely feel television soaps should be banned! In my response to this article, I need to firstly refer to a chapter in my book ‘The Eccentric Universe’, entitled ‘Inaccuracies and ambiguities at the forefront of knowledge‘, which focuses on how a considerable amount of our ancestral knowledge is built on some fairly flaky presumptions; either guessed, surmised, printed and believed, passed on as wives’ tales or made up to save face or in pursuit of fame and glory. One of my favourite passages which places this in perspective and places the above ‘Black Hole Firewall’ article firmly on the spot, is best analysed in conjunction with a passage taken from the sub-chapter ‘A different angle on life – sceptical of all knowledge’, which reads thus:

“ You only have to be involved with any news item to realise that newspaper editors have a field day with the truth, twisting it to become almost another story entirely. Even worse are the 1937 encyclopaedias, still sitting on my parents’ bookshelves, which tell you that scientists believe certain markings of Mars are areas of cabbage-like vegetation, which spring into life when water from the melting polar caps reaches them.

It frightens me that I was born only twenty-five years after these encyclopaedias were published. Goodness only knows the extent of the inaccuracy of the historical and ancestral facts we have brought forward in time within our cultures. Another of the claims about Mars was, “The dark spots at the junction of the canals on Mars are believed to be centres of habitation, their dark appearance being caused by the growth of vegetation watered by the canals”. It amazes me that the second part of this sentence is so convincingly based on a belief suggested within the first part of the sentence. To check the accuracy of text written about other known woolly topics, I decided to read the 1937 encyclopaedia entry regarding the Egyptian pyramids. I made a note of the ambiguous aspects of knowledge similar to the inaccurate planet Mars description. Well, about the Sphinx, the 1937 encyclopaedia entry reads, “No one can estimate the age of this gigantic figure carved in rock and partly buried in the sand.” This is not too bad, at least they are honest. About the Great Pyramid at Cheops it reads, “Cheops was an Egyptian king and the pyramid forms his tomb.” Clearly, if there was any ambiguity before 1937 it has now been ironed out, and everyone is to believe that the two point two million stones making up the pyramid, each stone weighing from five tons upwards to seventy tons, were just for a chap who popped his clogs. How about considering that the pyramid was there already and they buried this guy within it because they were “not so clever?” Also, it was built for some totally different reason, as we now know. However, no one grasped it because no one gave it a thought, after being spoon-fed information from a reprint of a 1937 encyclopaedia. Knowing what I know now, as far as I am concerned, if the Great Pyramid is alleged to have been built to contain the body of a person, then that is absolute poppycock! ”

Note how the section I have highlighted in green is written as a fact without the word belief anywhere near it, giving the reader no option other than to believe it when read in the encyclopaedia. As a consequence my parents knew that cabbage-like vegetation grew on Mars irrigated by alien-made canals. Well nothing else is out there other than aliens that are capable of building them!

The essence of what I have highlighted above is prevalent within the article about Black Hole Firewalls. See the highlighted sections below bearing in mind my previous points and what I am referring to will come clear:

From the Black Hole Firewall article:

Now a new hypothesis is giving poor Alice even more drama than she bargained for. If this alternative is correct, as the unsuspecting Alice crosses the event horizon, she will encounter a massive wall of fire that will incinerate her on the spot. As unfair as this seems for Alice, the scenario would also mean that at least one of three cherished notions in theoretical physics must be wrong.

This is quite possibly not the case too!

My immediate view on these postulate challenge is as follows.

i) Physicists are permanently presenting new suggestions and ideas; this one is particularly challenging as thinking of all the aspects of quantum physics entwined within all these postulates is like patting your head, rubbing your stomach, tapping a foot, doing a circle motion with the other foot, nodding your head and humming a tough tune at the same time; if you manage to do this I’ll hire you for my next party! … the net result is that even people thoroughly in the ‘know’ cannot think of every angle easily. Many cooks thinking drown the correct answer floating about with someone somewhere.

ii) I feel it may be possible to have a set of physics which all work individually when viewed, but together they fail, just like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and quantum entanglement; they throw up an impossible situation for us to comprehend. I will explain in more detail when I see you next.

iii) We only know the tip of the iceberg! … it’s enormous underneath this particular one, plus we suffer from not being advanced enough, but we are getting there slowly.

The Black Hole Firewall is a most interesting topic and people are actively seeking some kind of solution. I am writing a sequel to ‘The eccentric Universe’ called ‘Eccentric Reality’ with my great friend Graham Partis, this new book comes from the angle of that the Universe is actually just holographic … Graham and I are pretty convinced of this as so many things lead us this way, in fact, almost everything can be explained in this way! We get a great buzz from this at all times and we are both very excited about our research.

In our Holographic Universe Theory (pun … we live in a HUT!) we have two separate explanations of the same situation as the article when seen from different dimensional perspectives. From Alice’s perspective she should notice nothing strange going over the event horizon, but by Bob’s external quantum or spacetime views Alice turns into a holographic field equation or is frozen in time; most likely in the same sense that light is said to travel in space but not in time. Hence, the most logical answer is she simply gets frozen and has no more experiences after the event horizon. If we add evaporation to the situation her information may be destroyed or scrambled.

I am personally an advocate that matter is created when it pops into and out of existence momentarily near an event horizon. Because it can pop into existence in wave form, when it does this at the right spot near an event horizon the brother anti-particle flops immediately into the black hole leaving the wave particle isolated and unable to disappear; this is even then of course able to convert to a point particle – hey presto; we can exist!

Graham Partis has offered a Frozars solution to this problem which is similar to the Russian Frozen Stars solution; we will be expanding on this in the new book.

Remember that when anything goes past an event horizon it loses contact with the world on the other side of the horizon. Graham and I do not think that if Bob flopped into a black hole that he could ever catch up with Alice. If this is the case, then the Universe has always been here; which is another of my latest and strongest concepts to grasp.

Author- Rob Lowe (IYSN Coordinator)