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Black holes are hologram generators: study

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Press Trust of India Washington
Last Updated : Jun 17 2015 | 6:22 PM IST
Black holes are not ruthless killers but rather benign copy machines of a sort, according to a new study by an Indian-origin scientist.
In fact, if Earth was sucked into a black hole, we would not even notice as it would become a hologram copy and continue to exist, according to Samir Mathur, professor of physics at The Ohio State University.
Mathur said that the recently proposed idea that black holes have "firewalls" that destroy all they touch has a loophole.
In a new study, Mathur claims to have proven mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom.
More than a decade ago, Mathur used the principles of string theory to show that black holes are actually tangled-up balls of cosmic strings. His "fuzzball theory" helped resolve certain contradictions in how physicists think of black holes.
But when a group of researchers recently tried to build on Mathur's theory, they concluded that the surface of the fuzzball was actually a firewall.

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According to the firewall theory, the surface of the fuzzball is deadly.
Mathur and his team have been expanding on their fuzzball theory, too, and they have come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort.
They believe that when material touches the surface of a black hole, it becomes a hologram, a near-perfect copy of itself that continues to exist just as before.
There is a hypothesis in physics called complementarity, which requires that any such hologram created by a black hole be a perfect copy of the original.
Mathematically, physicists on both sides of the fuzzball-firewall debate have concluded that strict complementarity is not possible; That is to say, a perfect hologram can't form on the surface of a black hole.
Mathur and his colleagues have since developed a modified model of complementarity, in which they assume that an imperfect hologram forms.

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First Published: Jun 17 2015 | 6:22 PM IST

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