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EDMONTON JOURNAL

Physicist delves
into the drama
of black holes
DAV E L A Z Z A R I N O

Young pianist gets a few pointers

after her Kiwanis performance
Kinsey Verbeek, 9, receives feedback Wednesday after competing in the junior piano plan II event during the 108th
Kiwanis Music Festival at MacEwan University. E D K A I S E R

Its not every day you see the words

black hole and event horizon
used in scientific papers alongside
drama and naked firewall. But
when physicists get to talking quantum theory, anything can happen.
A paper co-authored by University of Alberta physics professor
Don Page is taking issue with a few
scientific assumptions that have
been made in the past 40 years
about black holes.
The putative black hole firewall
is one of the hottest problems in
physics today, Page said in a release
of the paper he co-authored with
contributors from universities in
Taiwan, the U.S., Sweden and Japan.
First, a little background. Black
holes are so massive they not only
warp space-time, but create a region that light cant escape.
Picture a bowling ball (the massive object) dropped into the centre of a huge, outstretched, rubber
parachute (space-time) and then
throw a small frog (light) into the
well thats created. Despite being
the fastest-moving frog in the universe, it still cant manage to hop
out of the weighted-down pit created by the ball.
Whats worse, some believe the
frog, and any other matter amphibious and otherwise that gets
too close to the ball gets squashed
by it and becomes part of it.
In the 1970s, Professor Stephen
Hawking suggested some particles
could escape the black hole, a theory
known as Hawking radiation.
Page and his co-authors have
raised problems with some of the
theories that followed.
Fluctuations of the Hawking radiation can shift the point where
the matter gets destroyed something referred to as a firewall
to become outside the point of no
return or event horizon so

This computer-simulated image

shows a supermassive black hole at
the core of a galaxy.NASA /ESA

that the firewall (also referred to as

drama) becomes visible from the
outside that is, naked.
Nobodys really sure whether
firewalls exist, Page added.
Past that, it gets even more complicated. If firewalls can be seen by
passing objects, making it a naked
firewall, it would suggest the firewall knows when those Hawking
radiation fluctuations are going
to happen, something Page said is
hard to believe.
In true scientific fashion, the
paper provides more new questions than answers. We dont really know enough to know whether
there are firewalls or not, he said.
Researchers are now left to test
three assumptions that there are
no firewalls (no drama), that information is not lost when it goes into
the black hole, and that different
regions of space are independent
of one another. The paper can be
found in its entirety through the
Cornell University Library.
dlazzarino@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/SUNDaveLazz

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