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A few grad students and I are starting a reading group on the Firewall problem and related aspects, so I’ve created a page in the nLab with a bunch of relevant papers:
(not yet a complete list.)
The goal will be to develop the page into a introduction to the problem, and the resolutions proposed, etc.
Thanks, Noon. I added a link to the Wikipedia page on the firewall, but ideally an independent summary would be best.
I regularised the name of the page and added a very brief summary.
Thanks. I have added a pointer to
Kyriakos Papadodimas, Suvrat Raju,
An Infalling Observer in AdS/CFT
which strikes me as being more of a computational physics argument than a random story.
As these authors remark in their introduction:
These [ BH firewall ] proposals originate not from direct calculations in quantum gravity, [ .. ] While quantum gravity is a mysterious subject, the AdS/CFT correspondence [12] provides us with a setting where we can examine these ideas within a perfectly well defined theory.
I have also tried to standardize the formatting of the references a bit.
Then I tried to rename the entry to “black hole firewall”, which seems to me to be the more descriptive title. Unfortunately, the nLab software is broken and the renaming did not work. Best to not further rename anything until this has been resolved (see the discussion here).
I have also added a pointer to
which amplifies the argument of Papadodimas and Raju a bit more, and how it stands out as being based on an actual computation in an actual theory.
Thanks for the updates and standardisation everyone, the page is looking a lot nicer!
However there is a quirk due to the re-naming. There are now two pages:
Where the last one is the more updated one. Should we delete one?
I’ve replaced the “black hole firewall” one with a link to “firewall problem” so-as to not lose some updates by having both around. Happy to shift the page to the “black hole firewall” page though, if that is best.
The main renaming bug appears to be fixed, so I’ve moved the black hole firewall one to empty 30 and renamed firewall problem to black hole firewall problem (wasn’t sure which name to pick!).
Thanks Noon, thanks Andrew!
Since the erstwhile [[empty 30]] has edit history in it, I moved it to black hole firewall > history.
ok - after all that, please don’t feel intimidated, Noon, from going ahead with your reading group. The above is just normal nLab sausage-making.
Thanks David, not to worry, I’m quite happy to have it formalised a bit!
Probably you mean formatted, not formalized?
We’ll come to the formalization of quantum gravity just a little bit later ;-)
I am not sure what David Roberts in #11 is referring to. Did we misbehave? Seemed to me that we said “thank you” and then offered a bunch of help. (The bugs in the nLab software don’t scare newcomers away, or do they?)
But maybe I may say one thing: if I were asked, I’d discourage young students of physics from looking into the “firewall problem”.
To me, the “firewall” discussion is one of several signs of a troubling degeneration of the level of sophistication in discussion among theoretical physicists. Physics enthusiasts used to say the following, to boast with their precision of thinking over their colleagues in other departments of natural science:
If you have nothing to say, then write an essay, if you have something to say, then write a formula.
But this attitude, won by hard fights back in the old days when “natural philosophy” turned into science, seems to be changing in part of the community these days. Most of the “firewall” discussion is an continued exachange of essays with no formal mathematical arguments in them. The physical laws by which the arguments proceed, to the extent that there are arguments, mostly remain vague or unstated or, in fact, unknown.
There are of course some exceptions, such as the article that I mentioned above.
Another thing that I find troubling is that the “public perception”, notably the science-sections of major magazins and newspapers, very consistently and continuously manage to pick out of all the very interesting fundamental physics that is going on these days the uninteresting bits. In itself we might not care, but in a big feedback loop, via laymen sitting in physics funding committees and via wishes and dreams seeded within young impressionable students, it comes back to the scientific community and hurts it.
If you judge from the newspapers these days, you must come to think that the deep topics of modern fundamental physics concern the nature of event horizons of black holes, the proposal that space is made of entropic polymers, the discovery of, behold, Grassmannian spaces and the like.
And this at a time when we are seeing so much deep physics happen. Not in the newspapers though.
Urs - the reason I personally am interested in this area is due to the ER=EPR paper and the idea of linking entanglement and black holes. To me it seems worthwhile to try and understand what that even means, hence the attempt to read about it.
Aside from that, it seems like a good excuse to get to know this area of physics, and you can never know ahead of time what you’ll get out of it.
Urs
I am not sure what David Roberts in #11 is referring to. Did we misbehave?
I only wanted Noon (and friends) to not be scared off by all this flurry of formal activity turning the page into something more structured - we know we can add stuff almost however and it will improve, but there’s the psychological barrier of having to ’get it right’ I wanted to dispel (perhaps needlessly).
You absolutely do not have to get it right; that's what lab elves are for!
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