On August 12, 2013, NY Times Online Edition Published The Following Commenty:

A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox

By DENNIS OVERBYE Published: August 12, 2013 372 Comments

And The Following Comment By Abhas Mitra Pointed Out That The Only Real Resolution of the ``Firewall Paradox Was That There Were No Exact Black Holes or Event Horizons. And on January 22, 2014, Stephen Hawking Arrived At the Same Conclusion From Tentative Arguments. In Contrast the Results By Mitra Are Definite & Based On Exact Calculations Published in Series of Peer Reviewed Papers Over 13 Years (20002013)

Abhas Mitra Mumbai, India August 15, 2013

Einsteins intuition was CORRECT contrary to what is believed. This is so because it has been shown that though the BH solutions are exact they involve integration constants whose values are zero. Precisely, it has been shown that the Schwarzschild BHs correspond to unique gravitational mass M=0 (Mitra, J Mat Phys, 50, I 042502 2009). Similarly Kerr BHs too correspond to M=0 and rotation parameter a=0 (Mitra astro-ph/0409049, 0407501). This means that the static BH solutions correspond to the asymptotic final states of physical gravitational collapse where entire mass-energy and angular momentum are radiated away. Thus so-called BH Candidates must be Quasi- BHs rather than true BHs. Further it has been shown that the natural form of the quasi-BHs are quasi-static hot balls of plasma /fire (Eternally Collapsing Objects) where outward radiation pressure balances the inward pull of gravity: i.e., ECOs radiate at their GR Eddington Luminosity. (Mitra , MNRASL ,404, L50, 2010; MNRAS 367, L66, 2006; 369, 492, 2006). Since there is no true BH, there is no ``Information Paradox, no need to inconsistently picture the VACUUM Event Horizon as a FIREBALL or Brick Wall or Membrane. But ECO is being ball of Fire/Plasma, ECO surface is indeed a FIREWALL. So BH Information paradox is already solved without resorting to self-contradictory pictures: http://www.ias.ac.in/pramana/v73/p615/p615.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/science/space/a-black-hole-mystery-wrapped-in-a-firewallparadox.html?pagewanted=all#commentsContainer

This time, they say, Einstein might really be wrong.

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Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Raphael Bousso.

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A high-octane debate has broken out among the worlds physicists about what would happen if you jumped into a black hole, a fearsome gravitational monster that can swallow matter, energy and even light. You would die, of course, but how? Crushed smaller than a dust mote by monstrous gravity, as astronomers and science fiction writers have been telling us for decades? Or flash-fried by a firewall of energy, as an alarming new calculation seems to indicate? This dire-sounding debate has spawned a profusion of papers, blog posts and workshops over the last year. At stake is not Einsteins reputation, which is after all secure, or even the efficacy of our iPhones, but perhaps the basis of his general theory of relativity, the theory of gravity, on which our understanding of the universe is based. Or some other fundamental long-established principle of nature might have to be abandoned, but physicists dont agree on which one, and they have been flip-flopping and changing positions almost weekly, with no resolution in sight. I was a yo-yo on this, said one of the more prolific authors in the field, Leonard Susskind of Stanford. He paused and added, I havent changed my mind in a few months now.

Raphael Bousso, a theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, said, Ive never been so surprised. I dont know what to expect. You might wonder who cares, especially if encountering a black hole is not on your calendar. But some of the basic tenets of modern science and of Einsteins theory are at stake in the firewall paradox, as it is known. It points to something missing in our understanding of gravity, said Joseph Polchinski, of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., one of thetheorists who set off this confusion. Down this rabbit hole are many of the jazzy magical mysteries of modern physics: Black holes. The shortcuts through space and time called wormholes. Quantum entanglement, also known as spooky action at a distance, in which particles separated by light-years can still instantaneously appear to remain connected. The reward for going down this hole could be a new understanding of why we think we live in a universe with space and time at all, with suitably unpredictable consequences. After all, if Einstein hadnt been troubled a century ago by logical inconsistencies in the Newtonian universe, we might not have GPS systems, which rely on his theory of general relativity to keep time, in our pockets today. Falling Bodies Black holes are the most extreme predictions of Einsteins theory, which describes how matter and energy warp the geometry of space and time the way a heavy sleeper causes a mattress to sag. Too much matter and energy in one place could cause space to sag so far that the matter inside it would disappear as if behind a magicians cloak, collapsing endlessly to a point of infinite density known as a singularity. Einstein thought that idea was ridiculous when it was pointed out to him at the time, in 1916, but today astronomers agree that the universe is speckled with such dark monsters, including beasts lurking in the hearts of most galaxies that are millions and billions of time more massive than the Sun. Many of them resulted from the collapse of dead stars. General relativity is based on what Einstein later called his happiest thought, that a freely falling person would not feel his weight. It is known simply as the equivalence principle; it says that empty space looks the same everywhere and to everyone. One consequence of this principle is that an astronaut would not feel anything special happening when he fell through the point of no return, known as the event horizon, into a black hole. Like a bungee jumper, he would feel weightless then and all the way until he hit

the bottom, which could take seconds or years depending on how big the hole was, and he would be stretched like a noodle by tidal forces and then crushed into a speck. At the event horizon there would be no drama, in the lexicon at least in the physical sense, as opposed to the intellectual trauma of knowing you were not ever going home. Things or people went in, they got crushed to infinite density and disappeared. That was the traditional view of black holes. Things got more interesting, however, in 1974 when Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist, stunned the world by showing that when the paradoxical quantum laws that describe subatomic behavior were taken into account, black holes would leak particles and radiation, and in fact eventually explode, although for a hole the mass of a star it would take longer than the age of the universe. This was a breakthrough in combining general relativity, the gravity that curves the cosmos, with quantum theory, which describes the microscopic quirkiness inside it, but there was a big hitch. Dr. Hawking concluded that the radiation coming from a black hole would be completely random, conveying no information about what had fallen into it. When the black hole finally exploded, all that information would be erased from the universe forever. God not only plays dice with the universe, Dr. Hawking said in 1976 in a riposte to Einsteins famous doubts about the randomness of quantum theory, he sometimes throws them where they cant be seen. Particle physicists cried foul, saying that this violated a basic tenet of modern science and of quantum theory, that information is always preserved. From the material in the smoke and flames of a burning book, for example, one could figure out whether it was the Bible or the Kama Sutra; the same should be true of the fizz and pop of black holes, these physicists argued. A 30-year controversy ensued. It was front-page news in 2004 when Dr. Hawking finally said that he had been wrong, and paid off a bet. The Firewall Paradox Now, however, some physicists say that Dr. Hawking might have conceded too soon. He had good reason, said Dr. Polchinski, but he gave up for the wrong reason. Nobody, he explained, had yet figured out exactly how information does get out of a black hole. That was the task that four researchers based in Santa Barbara Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, and James Sully, all from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Dr.

Polchinski of the Kavli Institute set themselves a year ago. The team (called AMPS, after their initials) found, to their surprise, that following the known laws of physics would lead to a contradiction, the firewall paradox. Their calculations showed that having information flowing out of a black hole was incompatible with having an otherwise smooth Einsteinian space-time at its boundary, the event horizon. In its place would be a discontinuity in the vacuum that would manifest itself as energetic particles a firewall lurking just inside the black hole. Being incinerated as you entered a black hole would certainly contradict Einsteins dictum of no drama. If this were true, you would in fact die long before the bungee-jumping ride ever got anywhere close to the bottom. The existence of a firewall would mean that the horizon, which according to general relativity is just empty space, is a special place, pulling the rug out from under Einsteins principle, his theory of gravity, and modern cosmology, which is based on general relativity. This presented the scientists with what Dr. Bousso calls the menu from hell. If the firewall argument was right, one of three ideas that lie at the heart and soul of modern physics, had to be wrong. Either information can be lost after all; Einsteins principle of equivalence is wrong; or quantum field theory, which describes how elementary particles and forces interact, is wrong and needs fixing. Abandoning any one of these would be revolutionary or appalling or both. Dr. Polchinski was very surprised by the result. It seemed like such a simple argument that it must have been considered and resolved earlier, he said. After trying to kill it by talking to colleagues in Santa Barbara, he e-mailed Dr. Susskind of Stanford, an old hand at black holes and information, expecting that Dr. Susskind would point out the error. But after a week or two of disbelief, Dr. Polchinski said, he was as confused as we were. Dr. Susskind said: The arguments are very clear. Nobody knew what to make of them. Quantum Vows The firewall argument hinges on one of the weirder aspects of quantum physics, the action called entanglement. As Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen pointed out in 1935, quantum theory predicts that a pair of particles can be connected in such a way that measuring a property of one its direction of spin, say will immediately affect the results of measuring the other one, even if it is light-years away.

Einstein used this spooky action at a distance to suggest the absurdity of quantum mechanics, but such experiments are now done in labs every day. You cant use it to send a message faster than light, because the correlation shows up only when the two experimenters get together and compare their respective results. But it plays a crucial role in quantum computing and cryptography and, it turns out, in explaining how information encoded in the Hawking radiation gets out of a black hole. Consider two particles (lets call them Bob and Alice) that have been radiated by a black hole. Bob left it eons ago, as it began leaking radiation; quantum entanglement theory dictates that in order for the black hole to keep track of what information it has been transmitting, Bob out there has to be entangled with Alice, who just left. But that scenario competes with another kind of entanglement, between particles on either side of the event horizon, the black holes boundary. If space is indeed smooth, as Einstein postulated, and if quantum field theory is correct, Alice must be entangled with another particle, Ted, who is just inside the black hole. But quantum theory forbids promiscuous entanglements. In the language of quantum information, Alice can marry either Bob or Ted, but not both, even if the second marriage happens inside the black hole where most of us cant see it. Alice should have a consistent explanation of the universe, Dr. Polchinski explained, just as we ourselves must, even though we are inside the cosmic horizon. And so smoke pours from the AMPS groups computers and has continued to pour from the particle accelerators of the mind, fueled by coffee and blackboard chalk this last year. Firewall or not? Does information live or die? Is Einstein at last wrong? Experiments would not help, even if we had a black hole in a laboratory, because the putative firewall, if it exists, would be just inside where it cant be seen safely. At a firewall workshop this winter, John Preskill, a Caltech theorist who won a bet with Dr. Hawking on the randomness of information from a black hole, declared that physicists were back where they had been 40 years ago. The Menu From Hell Dr. Bousso said his first response to the AMPS paper was, Come on, you gotta be kidding me. He added, Everybody goes through their stages of grief.

About 40 papers have been devoted to firewalls in the last year, and more are on the way. Daniel Harlow of Princeton and Patrick Hayden of McGill University suggested that the issue might be moot; the computation necessary to verify that Alice and Bob are entangled could take longer than the age of the universe and the black hole would evaporate in the meantime, making it impossible ever to go inside and experience the contradiction. Failing that, which of the items on Dr. Boussos menu from hell might have to go depends on who is speaking. In some ways, it would be easiest to give up quantum field theory, which describes what empty space should look like, in the case of someone who is being accelerated, perhaps by gravity pulling him down a black hole. After all, quantum theory, with virtual particles flitting in and out of existence and spooky entanglements is already strange. On the other hand, as Ed Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, who has so far watched the firewall debate from a distance, said, Quantum field theory is how the world works. It had a major triumph just a year ago, when the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle responsible for the mass of other subatomic particles, was discovered after a 40-year search, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Meanwhile, physicists have more reason than ever to think that information cannot be lost. A celebrated 1997 paper by Juan M. Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study describes nature as a kind of hologram, in which the information about what happens inside a volume of three-dimensional space, for example, is encoded in quantum equations on its two-dimensional boundary, the way a 3-D image is encoded on the face of your bank card. Mark Van Raamsdonk, a young theorist at the University of British Columbia, likes to use a spookier analogy to describe this, namely the chip that controls a Matrix-like video game. (Feel free to insert your own woo-woo music here.) The discovery that the information needed to describe what happens in some volume is proportional to the area enclosing that volume is the strangest and most far-reaching consequence of Dr. Hawkings discovery that black holes explode, and is still wreathed in mystery. Dr. Maldacenas universe is often portrayed like a can of soup, in which galaxies, black holes, gravity, stars and so forth, including us, are the soup inside, while the information to describe them resides, like a label, on the outside. Think of it as gravity in a can. The

equations that represent the label are deterministic and there is no room in them for information to be lost, implying that information in the universe inside is also preserved. Which leaves the firewall as the only way to stop the illegal marriage of Alice and Ted, Dr. Polchinski said an odious solution because it contravenes the basic principle of general relativity. He pointed out, however, that in a sense physicists had already thrown Einstein under the bus. In Dr. Maldacenas holographic universe, considered to be the last word on quantum gravity, the dimensions of space-time do not seem to matter. Weve known for years that space-time is not fundamental, Dr. Polchinski said. General relativity is not fundamental. He went on, space-time is emergent. Gravity is emergent. Maybe sometimes it doesnt always emerge. Einsteins Revenge But if space and time and gravity are not fundamental, what is? Recently a new way of solving the firewall conundrum and of answering that haunting question has attracted a lot of attention, although no consensus. Dr. Maldacena and Dr. Susskind have proposed that Einstein could come to his own rescue via one more far-out notion in modern physics: wormholes. In 1935 Einstein and Rosen found that, mathematically anyway, black holes could come in pairs connected by shortcuts through space then known as Einstein-Rosen bridges, now known as wormholes. A wormhole would not be traversable by any means we now know about, ruling out time travel and other violations of relativity, despite the dreams of science fiction writers and interstellar pioneers. In 2010, Dr. Van Raamsdonk of British Columbia suggested that such wormholes were the geometric manifestations of quantum entanglement. After all, neither of these phenomena, which seemed to transcend local space, could be used for sending direct messages. Brian Swingle at M.I.T. had made a similar suggestion a year earlier. In effect, what these theorists were saying was that without the phenomenon of entanglement, space-time would have no structure at all. Or as Dr. Maldacena put it, Spooky action at a distance creates space-time. If true, this insight would be a step toward a longtime dream of theorists of explaining how space and time emerge from some more

basic property of reality, in this case, bits of quantum information. The theoristJohn Wheeler, of Princeton, who had coined the term black hole, called this concept it from bit. Taking this idea seriously, Dr. Maldacena and Dr. Susskind proposed that a similar kind of wormhole arrangement existed between the black hole in the AMPS case and its Hawking radiation. Instead of a tunnel snaking through hyperspace and opening at the maw of another black hole, the wormhole would split into a zillion spaghetti-like strands ending on each of the pieces of Hawking radiation. That would mean that Bob, the Hawking particle in the cartoon version of the theory mentioned above, might be light years away from the event horizon, but he would still be connected to the interior of the black hole, as if there were a doorway in New Jersey that opened up into a basement in Manhattan. Because of this wormhole connection, Dr. Maldacena explained, Ted and Bob are the same. So the result is sort of like the happy ending of one of those screwball romantic comedies that involve mistaken identity and the handsome vagabond turns out to be the prince in disguise; Alice can marry Ted who is really Bob and the bonds of matrimony extend smoothly across the edge of the black hole. In that case, then, there is no firewall, no contradiction in the laws of physics. And Einstein survives to fight another day. If right, this is clearly a major insight into gravity and quantum mechanics, an enthusiastic Dr. Susskind said. I think of it as a very dramatic thing, he said, noting that long after Einsteins career was presumed to be over, at 56, he produced these ideas of entanglement and wormholes having no idea they were connected. The man keeps giving. But Einstein is not safe yet. At first whiff, Dr. Preskill wrote in a recent blog post, the Maldacena-Susskind conjecture may smell fresh and sweet, but it will have to ripen on the shelf for a while. He added, For now, wormhole lovers can relish the possibilities. Entangled Theories Dr. Maldacena and Dr. Susskind admit that the wormhole hypothesis is still a work in progress. Few of their colleagues are convinced yet that it has been formulated in sufficient

detail, let alone that it can solve the firewall paradox. All I can say, Dr. Susskind said in an e-mail on the eve of a firewall workshop next week at the Kavli Institute where wormholes and everything else will surely be scrutinized, is that no one has a completely solid case and that certainly includes me. Time will tell. Dr. Polchinski said, My current thinking is that all the arguments that we are having are the kind of arguments that you make when you dont have a theory. We need a more complete theory of gravity, he concluded. Maybe space-time from entanglement is the right place to start, he wrote. I am not sure. Dr. Bousso, who has been e-mailing with Dr. Maldacena, is skeptical that the wormholes will eliminate firewalls. My own view is that its time to move on, accept, and actually understand firewalls, he said. After all, he added, theres no principle of nonviolence in the universe, except for Einsteins equivalence principle, which says the black holes horizon is not a special place. But maybe it is, after all. Meanwhile, Dr. Bousso said, the present debate had raised his estimation, by another few notches, of the stupendous magnitude of Dr. Hawkings original discovery of the information paradox. The firewall paradox, he said, tells us that the conceptual cost of getting information back out of a black hole is even more revolutionary than most of us had believed.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 13, 2013, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Einstein and the Black Hole.

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baileyhmv2018 Toledo, OH

This article is about the long going argument about black holes and dark matter. I think it is amazing that matter can disappear in a matter of seconds. It doesn't just go somewhere, it disappears and will never exist again. This argument is obviously not going to end for many years to come and it would be amazing if we ever did find out what would happen if you fell into a black hole. Though many physicists would be applied to putting all their research together I think it would help. If all physicists put their research together we might be one step closer to stopping this argument. o
Aug. 15, 2013 at 8:42 p.m.

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Abhas Mitra Mumbai, India

Einsteins intuition was CORRECT contrary to what is believed. This is so because it has been shown that though the BH solutions are exact they involve integration constants whose values are zero. Precisely, it has been shown that the Schwarzschild BHs correspond to unique gravitational mass M=0 (Mitra, J Mat Phys, 50, I 042502 2009). Similarly Kerr BHs too correspond to M=0 and rotation parameter a=0 (Mitra astro-ph/0409049, 0407501). This means that the static BH solutions correspond to the asymptotic final states of physical gravitational collapse where entire mass-energy and angular momentum are radiated away. Thus so-called BH Candidates must be Quasi- BHs rather than true BHs. Further it has been shown that the natural form of the quasi-BHs are quasi-static hot balls of plasma /fire (Eternally Collapsing Objects) where outward radiation pressure balances the inward pull of gravity: i.e., ECOs radiate at their GR Eddington Luminosity. (Mitra , MNRASL ,404, L50, 2010; MNRAS 367, L66, 2006; 369, 492, 2006). Since there is no true BH, there is no

``Information Paradox, no need to inconsistently picture the VACUUM Event Horizon as a FIREBALL or Brick Wall or Membrane. But ECO is being ball of Fire/Plasma, ECO surface is indeed a FIREWALL. So BH Information paradox is already solved without resorting to selfcontradictory pictures: http://www.ias.ac.in/pramana/v73/p615/p615.pdf

o O

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:07 a.m.

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amit chirstain now in kathamandu

its true when any body lying in it ,but on some place he will not feel light and also gravity because gravity here proptional to electromagnetic field and also photn behavior ,and some place he will feel light and gravity in proptional to electromagenetic field. so here the story has begun about black hole.photon behviour could change and if phton behaviour will change light behviour could change ,because on earth paralelely lfie is going on we see or we cant see ,in my point of view thanks "A"

o O

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:06 a.m.

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Terry McDanel St Paul, MN

Reading of this debate and listening to from various sources, i am reminded of Kurt Gdel's incompleteness theorems. He proved that in an axiomatic system there will be propositions, or true statements, that cannot be proved. And, if my understanding is correct, there inevitably will be apparent contradictions or unsolvable problems. The debate makes me wonder if we will not find physics and its presumed self-consistent and complete description of the our universe to be similar. If this is true, at the very edges of the description, that is at the greatest extremes of physical existence, we will find contradictory predictions. Quantum mechanics and General Relativity describe black holes in very different ways because

they looking at the universe from exactly opposite prospectives, the unimaginable structures that govern the cosmos and the unimaginably small events that govern each microcosm. If there is a holy grail in physics, for the last century it has been the hope to combine the two into a complete, consistent, comfortable description. But will Gdel's assertion, by nature of perspective, mean they will always be at odds?

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:06 a.m.

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amit chirstain now in kathamandu

photon in black hole no more photons ,they become part of it ,means eaten by charged ions and elctromagentic ,field ,it means light is not light ,its benting but in stratight ,just we saif when we used blade and see reflection from sharp teeth of blade ,so its is just that kind of , there is more is how photn get charge and light get lost ,its two way we could define , one prizm that making wavelenght of light week means distrbutuon of light ,and one elctromagnetic field and chargee ion ,those making dumb photns movement. so here light has lost ,not as we are thiking ,time to time if we will keep prizm then they light will lost and its strenght will lost ,and if we will see photn working they are uncharged ,but electromagentic filed and high density enviornment if we will consider infinty ,then photon dischrge that we were thiking that all time ,it will not

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:06 a.m.

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A.J. Sutter Tokyo, Japan

"Information is always preserved" applies at best at the quantum level, not at the macroscopic one. Moreover, "information" refers to strings of symbols, not to their meaning. This article's claim about the Bible and the Kama Sutra blurs each of these distinctions. Particularly, it ignores that printed letters aren't encoded at the quantum level. Each letter is a bulk aggregate of around 10E16 atoms. Bulk chemistry doesn't always preserve information. Suppose we could distinguish individual

burning letters on a page because they use different amounts of ink. Books tend to burn from their edges inward, and many letters will burn simultaneously; fire would "read" the letters to us in a jumble. To distinguish two books we'd need both to know a priori the statistical characteristics of the texts being burnt, and to detect a sufficient sample of distinct burning letters from each. Now print out someone's genome but replace the ATGC of the genetic code with p, q, b, and d, all printed with the same size and shape. Read it in English, Arabic and Japanese styles and the information will change. Burn it. Detecting amounts of burning ink would tell us nothing about the correct orientations of each burning symbol or of the book itself. And simply: once a book's last copy is burnt, it can't be read. Dissenters should kindly restore all the texts from the ancient library of Alexandria, to prove their point.

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:06 a.m.

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amit chirstain now in kathamandu

so thats why light is not appearing ,if we will consider ,it is just like zero pinpoint where light will not be reflect ,means simple making photns so centric in this electro magnetic field ,thats why in black hole lot of dimensions where light has trapped m,means photons ,or they become part of ccharge by some great electro magentic field ,so from surface to end black is telling us how one ,planet convert in it and means when it was palnet there was lot of dimensions with light ,and same in blackhole but its infinty dimensions ,we cant predict over that .

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:06 a.m.

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amit chirstain now in kathamandu

i am not in favour too much first its imaginary and second if light is lost and so reason is simple there is so much gravity field as we know ,lot of elctro magnetic reaction ,by that only one thing happned a unarged photon become part of chrging numbers over there ,just like neutron they made up nucleaus part or just become charge

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:06 a.m.

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Retired Veteran NH

What of the possibility of Ted and Bob each being half of the other? There are so many possibilities "The Impossible Is Possible!"

Aug. 15, 2013 at 10:05 a.m.

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Ann Paddock Dayton, Ohio

Gravitation is a by-product of mass. i can tell you where a car on the freeway is, or how fast it is traveling, not both. The macro and the micro are of the same stuff. Want to understand the universe, understand the function of the human brain. Everything "our there" is in here. Find it.

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Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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notohp2002 USA

It is all very very interesting. Not trying to be funny. I was thinking if the particles of the universe are entangled ( connected forever) does this mean that eventually the universe will violate the principle of thermodynamics ( cannot recall the right word for it) and contract or go

backwords exactly as it expanded but in reverse, because the particles retain information to guide the collapse.

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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JeanValJean NYC

So- lemme get this right- the newly forming black hole becomes infinitely dense, infinitely massive, expands at the speed of light and the "firewall" of the black hole contains all the 2-d coded information for the 3-d universe within. Right? So what's the issue?

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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Robert L. Oldershaw Amherst, MA, USA

It is important to understand the difference between theories of principle (Special or General Relativity) and model-building (the Standard Model of particle physics, especially Quantum ChromoDynamics). Model-building can work moderately well if you start out with assumptions that are empirically well-motivated. However, if your model-building has a foundation that contains one or more fundamental assumptions that are wrong (e.g., Ptolemaic astronomy) then your models get increasingly weird, complicated, and in need of ever more "epicycles" to "save the phenomenon". In the early 1900s physicists adopted three dubious and closely related fundamental assumptions: strict reductionism, absolute scale, and absolute scale invariance for dimensional "constants" like the gravitational coupling constant, G.

Increasingly, physics has suffered from these assumptions. Perhaps we are approaching the point at which the anxiety over the lack of progress in theoretical physics is getting severe enough for physicists to go back and explore three alternative assumptions: limited reductionism, relative scale, and self-similar scaling throughout nature. These alternative assumptions lead naturally to a fully unified paradigm for all of nature based on conformal geometry and the fundamental symmetry of discrete self-similarity, i.e., a discrete fractal paradigm for the cosmos. Robert L. Oldershaw http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw Discrete Scale Relativity/Fractal Cosmology

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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Norton Nevada

Ben Bederson, one of my old NYU. graduate school plasma/atomic physics(his expertise) professor's comment "This is the closest I have ever seen in NYT to a genuine scientific article in a peer reviewed physics journal. It was thrilling to read, (capitalizing his words for emphasis) 'EVEN THOUGH I BARELY UNDERSTOOD MUCH OF ITS CONTENT, THE SAME AS WHEN I READ PEER REVIEWED PHYSICS JOURNALS'". evokes the same awe(s _ _ t) as his incomprehensible plasma physics lectures. Methinks maybe he was writing this as recent American Physical Society journals editor-in-chief official to promote physics, but really Ben, if you barely understood much of its contents, the same as when you read a peer reviewed paper, then, like Timothy Glennon's first comment yesterday (now deleted it seems) "Articles like this, although I got through it all, give me a headache... literally.... trying to follow the flow of words and make sense out of the concepts and conclusions...finally filling me, a well educated, intelligent, and well-read adult, with wonder at how much I don't know and will never know or understand about something that so clearly has great relevance and meaning to so many people, witness the replies here...it's very humbling". Such "jargonial-obfuscation" aka fancy shmancy lingo to snow the rubes is mere media-hype P.R. spin-doctoring "show-biz". It's only August, not X-mas, but this snow job is early; "thrilling" maybe, but gibberish in its meaning which is after all why it exists.

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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Norton Nevada

Jim Baggott's book "Farewell to Reality: How Fairytale(THE CORRECT WORD!!!) Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth" hits the nail on the head deadon!!! Bravo!!! (It joins such notables as: Dewedney's "Yes We Have No Neutrons:, Pigliucci's "Nonsense on Stilts", Pielke and Pielke-Jarvis' "Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future", Parks' "Voodoo Science", Perelman and Correidora's "How Physics and Astronomy Get Done", Naser and Gruber's "Manifold Destiny",... ad infinitum, ad NAUSEUM!!!). Overblown Overbye: typical sycophant media-hype P.R. spin-doctoring show-biz!!! "Full of fury, signifying probably absolutely nothing!!! Lotsa fancy shmancy lingo to snow the rubes, aka "jargonial obfuscation"!!! Quoting Heinrich Heine "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten"(I don't know what to believe). Equally believable is classic oriental "the universe is a kumquat, unless it is a persimmon" or "you can never sometimes tell what you least expect most".

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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Dave in Pa Pennsylvania

The Universe, and all therein, is an incomprehensibly profound and complex Thought in the mind of God. I believe we will be ultimately unable to comprehend the "big picture" of the Universe, instead only understanding some of the facets, as only God can comprehend Himself or the totality of His creation.

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:52 a.m.

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Paul Johnson Helena Montana

What is Dr. Susskind suggesting when he states that "time" will tell?

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:51 a.m.

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harry michigan

Before I reach the event horizon I hope someone is born who will conceptualize gravity. I still hope humanity will flourish and survive when the riddle of gravity is finally solved. This article and the comments are why I still keep my beloved times subscription.

o O

Aug. 15, 2013 at 5:51 a.m.

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Abhas Mitra Mumbai, India

Einstein's intuition was right. This is so because it has been shown that though the BH solutions are exact they involve integration constants whose values are zero. To be precise, it has been shown that the Schwarzschild BHs correspond to unique gravitational mass M=0 ( Mitra, J Math Phys 50, 4, 042502, 2009). Similarly Kerr BHs too correspond to M=0 and rotation parameter a=0 (Mitra; astro-ph/0409049, 0407501). This means that the static BH solutions correspond to the asymptotic final states of physical gravitational collapse where entire massenergy and angular momentum are radiated away. Thus the so-called BH Candidates must be Quasi- BHs rather than true BHs. Further it has been shown that the natural form of the quasiBHs are quasi-static hot balls of plasma (Eternally Collapsing Objects) where outward radiation pressure balances the inward pull of gravity: i.e., ECOs radiate at their GR Eddington Luminosity. (Mitra MNRAS 404, pp. L50-L54, 2010; MNRAS 367, L66-L68, 2006; 369, 492496, 2006). So BH candidate surfaces really have FIREWALLS without the self-contradictory

mumbo-jumbo: ``Event Horizon is a vacuum surface with no special property'' and yet ideas like ``EH behaves like a MEMBRANE, or BRICK WALL, where quantum gravity effects are immense... and now EH is a FIREWALL'' . Unfortunately even Nobel laureate physicists are vying with one another to own a pie of the ``BH mystery'' and ``Information Paradox''. There is no exact BH, and no paradox. But golden goose...

Aug. 14, 2013 at 8:03 p.m.

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Rob Keyse Bethlehem, PA

I can understand why Alice and Bob are entangled, they were created (out of nothing) at the same place and at the same time, one just inside and the other just outside of the event horizon. Actually I'm not sure that they were created at the same time because time and space are not independent - especially at or near a black hole and of course, by definition they were not created at the same place either. Anyway quantum laws suggest that they were both part of the same event and are therefore entangled. As for Ted, like some old uncle from across the other side of the world, I cannot see any reason at all to suppose that he be entangled with Alice or with Bob - he should have a Susan somewhere inside the hole. Surely Susan has as much of a connection to Bob as Ted does with Alice! Besides I really don't see how there is any coherence across the generations; or what kind of information exists in Susan that must necessarily be endowed to Alice?

Aug. 14, 2013 at 8:03 p.m.

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Chris Indiana

Who cares? What has this got to do with me waking up in the morning, breaking my back at a dead end job, and repeating it the next day? Birth, life, death, thats what happens. It doesnt

matter what's inside a black hole! optimusmickey1@wowway.com

Aug. 14, 2013 at 8:03 p.m.

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berchman Carlisle, PA

This article is complete gibberish to me. Perhaps that is because the author is translating mathematical equations, the language of physics, into English.

Aug. 14, 2013 at 8:03 p.m.

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Arnie Tracey Ottawa Ontario Canada

It seems that this science has reached it's logical end, and has transcended into a wormhole of illogically speculative grasping. In Information Technology we have the KISS acronym, meaning Keep It Simple, Stupid. I'd be willing to share KISS with physicists.

o O

Aug. 14, 2013 at 8:03 p.m.

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mreda14 Calgary AB Canada

Mother Nature once upon century creates a gifted person by random mutation of genes combined with evolution and sure it did when the late Prof. A. Einstein presented his theory of gravitational force and relativity and late prof. James Clerk Maxwell when he laid the foundation of mathematical physics. It is well known fact that Prof. Maxwell most prominent achievement was to formulate a set of equations that united previously unrelated observations, experiments, and equations of electricity, magnetism, and optics into a consistent theory. His theory of classical electromagnetism demonstrates that electricity, magnetism and light are all manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's achievements concerning electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics", after the first one realised by Isaac Newton. It is obvious that the studies of black holes all based on the result of telescope observation. These telescope harvest light that supposed to come from black holes that are millions of light years away. In fact light has to travel in space millions of years ago in order to reach the telescope on earth in 2012. Basically what we see in the telescope is incidents that happen millions or not billions of years ago.

Aug. 14, 2013 at 8:03 p.m.

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at large Paris

Actually: Schroedinger's cat is not even really here - much less dead or alive. We are not actually here. We are just manifestations of our real selves and our true beings located in some place far far away - or perhaps right next door. It is the height of arrogance to think that this iteration of our existence is "the existence".

Aug. 14, 2013 at 7:34 p.m.

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