Here is a new theory of a black hole's event horizon being a "fire wall" of high energy:
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In the article this "fire wall" is required based on the assumption of entanglement, and "breaking entanglement" releases energy and creates the firewall. It is causing a lot of dispute though since if the firewall exists, then apparently it goes against Einstein's equivalence principle. So it sounds like it is another nail in the coffin of "spooky action at a distance" entanglement!
Jamie hasn't read this article correctly. There's nothing wrong with entanglement - it's an experimentally established fact - but there's a lot wrong with general relativity when you try to apply it at a scale where quantum effects become visible. the article is just talking about just talking about one more example of this well-known fact.
I was basing my summary on this section from the article mid way down, which seems to indicate that if the firewall doesn't exist then entanglement may be flawed:
"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."
Would this firewall still exist with loop quantum gravity?
What is your opinion on where things are going to 'end up'?
Bigger things... not the smaller realm.
Oh, and check the January Scientific American for an article about Einstein's flaws with relation to a certain epoch in the early moments at the beginnings of our material universe.
The 'Of course he was wrong about this too" post was kind of stupid. Everybody was wrong about things back then. HE was closer than most about most of it. Period.
As I said, you've misunderstood what's being discussed. There's no evidence that the firewall does or doesn't exist - it's an artefact of a particular theoretical approach - while entanglement is real, so it's the theory that predicts the firewall that might be flawed.
I've never seen any compelling evidence for "spooky action at a distance" type entanglement, but lots of paradoxes and problems are created if you believe in it, and the firewall idea is just one more.
Most problems are consistent with hidden variables, i.e., at the moment an entangled particle system is created, the particles themselves are in whichever state -- you just can't tell which states they are until they hit the detector(s).
With this view, Schroedinger's equation isn't a description of the physical world, but only tells you what's observable (you can't observe the hidden variable directly, because your tools are too clumsy -- knock an electron with a photon and it's spinning wrong, etc.).
Problems that are not consistent with this include time-dependent interference. A classic experiement takes a two arm interferometer, with one arm perturbed (like with a 1/4 wave plate or something, so interference still occurs, and produces a certain result). (I don't remember the particular details, so I'm going to botch this explanation.) When a particle is fired, the 1/4 wave plate is momentarily modulated, just as the particle is passing. If the particles' behavior is consistent with hidden variables (i.e., the state of a given particle is distinguishable* and unchanged), interference cannot occur because, at the moment the one particle passed the now-changed piece of apparatus, there is no way for that change to propagate back up the beam to interfere with the other particle. Moreover, the experiment can be done with opposed interferometer arms, ruling out line-of-sight, light speed information propagation.
*Distinguishability is an important topic in QM and statistical mechanics. Electrons are all identical particles; the only way you can identify one is if it's put into a particular state (energy, momentum, postion, spin..). If you put a bunch of electrons into states with equal energy levels, you have no way of knowing whether those electrons switched places. They could've shuffled around and you wouldn't know. This is called a degenerate state, and has thermodynamic implications: because the states are indistinguishable, they are only counted once, so the entropy (S = k_B ln W, where W is the "number of states") is lower than if the energy levels are all a little bit different (and thus you could tell if one of the electrons switched places, because it would've had to exchange energy to do so).
Most of QM is consistent with hidden variables; QM, entirely, is not. As far as I know, QM *is* consistent with hidden variables *with retarded potentials*, but it's up to you which you find more disagreeable: instantaneous propagation, or propagation at light speed both forward *and backward* in time!
Which isn't as horrible as it sounds. Feynman and Wheeler spent a long time developing QED (i.e., QM (Schroedinger's) with electrons (the Dirac equation), and E&M (Maxwell's), combined in a complete theory) using retarded potentials. There are no antiparticles in this theory; what we call antiparticles are simply the regular things going backwards through time. Almost all reactions are reversible, so hey, why not?
Tim
--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
That's the same with "un-entangled particles" too, you can't tell which state they are in until they hit the detector. So what extra property is the word entangled describing in this case?
The beam that passes through the momentarily modulated plate is changed, so I don't see why you would expect there to be the same interference (as without the modulation) with the other beam. The only reason to expect something different is if you assumed there is spooky action at a distance entanglement between the two beams? Maybe I'm not understand the point of the experiment, if you could send a link for it I'd like to check it out. If you reverse the modification with another in phase modulated 1/4 wave plate then the two beams should interfere the same as before.
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