On 1/26/2014 12:40 PM, LizR wrote:
It's common knowledge - well, amongst people who are interested in this sort of thing -
that an outside observer sees an infalling object get stuck just outside the event
horizon of a black hole (and then fade away as it redshifts towards infinity)
This was explained in a (relatively) recent "scientific american" article using an
elephant as the example. The point is that the BH creates a superposition - the elephant
is a "schrodinger's cat" which is in both states (alive outside the BH, and dead
inside). I found it fascinating that this well known quantum thought experiment could be
done for real (in theory).
That's a very controversial theory though, since in the cat's (or elephant's) frame there
is notable about the horizon (per GR). Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski,
James Sully
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3123
and also Leonard Susskind have been proposing that there must be a "firewall" at the
horizon to prevent this kind of entanglement, because otherwise it would violate quantum
monogamy.
http://quantumfrontiers.com/2012/12/03/is-alice-burning-the-black-hole-firewall-controversy/
Hawking just delivered a somewhat cryptic paper saying there is no well defined
horizon.
http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583
I'm afraid SciAm has fallen into the trap of trying to compete with "Discovery" and the
tabloids.
Brent
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