[math-fun] Revolutionary new (?) idea about black holes -- they are weird inside
Henry Baker's post about "Nothing black about black holes" (by Cenalo Vaz, http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.3823 ) stimulated me to think on this again (I've thought about it a lot) now generating what seems like a new hot idea. (I don't think it has anything at all to do with Vaz's ideas, but this did stimulate me.) Here it is. In a previous (2003) work, I had pointed out that gravitons, i.e. the analogue of photons but for gravitational not electromagnetic waves, were sort of "one way." That is, a typical graviton interacts at most ONCE with matter, and never again. I proved a theorem of this kind, stating that "plane gravitational waves" in a flat space background could not be absorbed by (or redirected by) any absorber (or reflector, refractor, polarizer) with any efficiency greater than zero. This is one example of the fact that GR (general relativity - Einstein gravity) is IRREVERSIBLE unlike the rest of accepted physics which obeys CPT invariance and is a unitary transformation and in those senses is time-reversible. And there are other ways GR exhibits an "arrow of time" such as the theorem that black holes can merge but never bifurcate. These GR arrows of time are somewhat mysterious in the sense that they come from global and/or topological effects; the local laws of GR are time-reversible. Anyhow, I had in that previous work then pointed out that Von Neumann "measurement" in quantum mechanics was also "irreversible" and hence proclaimed the manifesto that decoherence/measurement effects in quantum mechanics all should be traceable to, and ultimately entirely caused by, time-irreversibility effects in quantum gravity. Furthermore, gravitons cannot be shielded out, and they interact with everything, and they do so usually only once, causing a "measurement by external environment" effect, causing everything to become non-weird. Why do you not experience being in a superposition of being in Tokyo and Paris? Because of such effects. Even though gravity is extremely weak I calculated numerically this effect alone could go a long way toward (probably the whole way toward) eliminating quantum weirdness from human experience. You can read said "previous work" here as paper #70 here: http://rangevoting.org/WarrenSmithPages/homepage/works.html That all was prologue for my new idea. Suppose you fall in thru the event horizon of a black hole. The usual old thinking based on exact solutions of GR had been: if it is a large enough hole, then you'll experience nothing out of the ordinary, will not notice anything, during the horizon crossing -- albeit eventually you are going to get crushed, tidally drawn & quartered, and die. But now here is my radically new (?) thinking. Nothing inside the event horizon can escape. Including gravitons. Further, if you emit a graviton, it is going to come back and hit you, since (at least for a Schwarzschild hole, the simplest exact solution) everything falls into the point singularity, including that graviton. Hence, the whole postulated mechanism underlying quantum decoherence, will simply stop operating inside event horizon. Hence HYPOTHESIS: INSIDE EVENT HORIZONS, QUANTUM "WEIRDNESS" REIGNS. MACROSCOPIC PHYSICS IS NO LONGER "CLASSICAL." In other words, if the Earth were inside some event horizon of some huge hole, with old-think, we would not necessarily know it, or anyhow it'd be hard to detect. With new-think, you'd experience superpositions of being in Paris & Tokyo, and actually, you'd probably not even be "alive" at all because everything would be too weird. Passing thru an event horizon would with new-think would probably instantly kill you, or anyhow radically change the nature of everything you experience, and basically eliminate "classical physics" as a good approximation of "physics." Although this seems a radical change in thinking about black holes and event horizons, it is one that does not require any radical clobbering of accepted physics ideas. It does, however, make one's head hurt and make one worry in new ways about "interpretation of quantum mechanics." Now obvious follow-up questions would be: 1. how does this impact the Hawking "information loss" paradox related to black hole evaporation? 2. ditto re the "firewall paradox." And it may be pretty hard to answer those without knowing (and we do not know) what "quantum gravity" is. GR is a classical gravity theory. If all classical physics including GR breaks down inside event horizons, then the whole description of spacetime as a "metric" and everything just may get blown away, and the replacement will be, whatever the true theory of quantum gravity is. Which we do not know. Now if we are outside the black hole but very close to its horizon, then things ought to be weirder the closer we get. (Only photons or gravitons headed in a very small angular cone of directions will be able to escape.) I.e. it will not be a sudden discontinuous transition to quantum weirdness. This means in principle experiments might be possible, and that some Hawking radiation analyses might change. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
To further explore this idea: 1. Vaz mentions the "black hole complementarity" idea by Susskind that Hawking radiation info is both emitted at the horizon and passes through it, so an observer outside would see the info in the Hawking radiation, but an observer inside would see it inside, but no single observer could confirm both pictures. With my "inside is weird" hypothesis, there could BE no "observer" inside. An "observer" in quantum mechanics is one who makes "measurements." A "measurement" in Von Neumann QM is a non-unitary process... which involves non-invertible information loss. In more modern "decoherence" views of QM, there are two parts of the universe, A and B, and although QM evolution is unitary, if you only look at the subsystem A, its evolution can look nonunitary and "measurement" can be approximately simulated. That view has problems if "A" is the entire universe (where is B?) but my picture is, A is the "normal matter" and B is the "gravitons" and then my theorem that A-B interactions usually happen only ONCE assures decoherence for the normal matter. Inside a GR black hole there is no such theorem, hence hypothetically no decoherence, no "measurement," and so there inherently cannot be any "observers" inside. 2. The very idea that spacetime is described by a "metric" is a classical (nonquantum) idea. Really, presumably the "metric" is the classical approximation of the effect of a huge number of gravitons forming the "gravitational field" which is a "quantum field" approximated by a classical field. Now inside the black hole if we accept my weirdness hypothesis, all such "classical" notions, since they depend on decoherence/measurement effects to eliminate "quantum weirdness," must be discarded. There is no classical physics. There is only quantum physics. "Weird" effects like "being in a superposition of many metrics" happen. Under the weirdness hypothesis, the whole use of GR to describe black hole interiors is bogus or at least highly suspect. They cannot be comprehended using classical physics like GR, at all.
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Warren D Smith