Abstract
Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully, recently reported a remarkable and
very surprising phenomenon involving old black holes. The authors argue that
after a black hole has radiated more than half its initial entropy, the horizon
is replaced by a "firewall" at which infalling observers burn up, in apparent
violation of one of the postulates of black hole complementarity. In this note
I will give a different interpretation of the firewall phenomenon in which the
properties of the horizon are conventional, but the dynamics of the singularity
are strongly modified. In this formulation the postulates of complementarity
are left intact. But the reader is nevertheless warned: black holes may be more
dangerous than you thought.
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