Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
If the Earth came into contact with a black hole, would it be instantly incinerated or would we barely even notice being captured by the region of deformed space-time? It is that debate that is at the heart of new research by a physics professor at Ohio State University.
In a new paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, OSU professor Samir Mathur explains that there’s a loophole with a recently proposed idea suggesting that there is a “firewall” of sorts that surrounds a black hole, destroying anything that comes into contact with it.
More than a decade ago, it was demonstrated that black holes are actually tangled balls of cosmic yarn through the principles of string theory. This so-called “fuzzball theory” helped resolve some of the contractions of how physicists view black holes, but experts attempting to build on his study instead concluded that the surface of this so-called fuzzball was a deadly firewall.
Mathur and his colleagues also have been working on expanding the fuzzball theory, but they have come to a drastically different conclusion. Instead of seeing black holes as a deadly killing machine, destroying all things that come into contact with them, the OSU team concluded that they are more like copy machines that create a hologram of the object they touch. Wait, what?
The core tenets of string theory are at stake
According to their new study, when material touches the surface of a black hole, it becomes a near-perfect copy of itself that continues to exist as if nothing had happened. The copy is not an exact replica, however, even though the hypothesis of complementarity requires that holograms created by black holes be a perfect copy of the original.
Both Mathur’s team and the proponents of the firewall theory have concluded, mathematically speaking, that strict complementarity is not possible and that a perfect hologram cannot form on the surface of a black hole. However, the OSU professor and his colleagues have come up with a modified model of complementarity that assumes an imperfect hologram forms.
The firewall theory claims that without strict complementarity, no hologram can be produced and the object that comes into contact with the black hole will meet a fiery end. However, Mathur’s latest study purportedly provides mathematical proof that modified complementarity is possible by assuming that black holes themselves are imperfect.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect black hole, because every black hole is different,” Mathur explained, referring to the resolution of the long-running debate over the so-called information paradox, in which physicists have admitted that material consumed by a black hole does not get destroyed, but instead becomes a part of the black hole itself.
This permanently alters the black hole, similar to splicing a new gene sequence into a person’s DNA, making each black hole a unique product of the material that happens comes into it. At the core of the debate is one of the tenets of string theory – whether our existence could be a hologram on a surface that exists in several other dimensions. The firewall theory states that this is impossible, while the fuzzball theory suggests otherwise.
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