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arXiv · 1403.5947

Schrodinger's Cat and the Firewall

Timothy J. Hollowood
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Abstract

It has been argued that when black holes are treated as quantum systems there are implications at the horizon and not just the singularity. Infalling observers will meet a firewall of high energy quanta. We argue that the question of whether an observer falling into a black hole experiences a smooth horizon or a firewall is identical to the question of whether Schrodinger's cat is either in a definite state, alive or dead, or in a superposition of the two. Since experience with real macro-systems indicate the former, the black hole state vector is seen to describe a set of decoherent alternatives each with a smooth horizon and the entanglement puzzle is thereby side stepped.

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Timothy J. Hollowood. 2014-04-11. Schrodinger's Cat and the Firewall. https://doi.org/10.1142/s0218271814410041

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