lawblawg t1_j2apya0 wrote
Reply to comment by Xethinus in What is our current "best guess" about how to observers that entered a black hole on opposite sides would look to each other once they crossed the event horizon? by WittyUnwittingly
So you’re quite correct on almost everything, except for the bit about being annihilated by Hawking radiation. This is the firewall problem. The event horizon cannot be defined objectively in general relativity; rather the event horizon is defined relative to an observer at a specified location. That’s because if the event horizon was a defined location, it would dictate a universal reference frame, which violates relativity.
So the event horizon cannot be accompanied by a firewall of deadly Hawking radiation. The currently accepted solution is that Hawking radiation is emitted from quantum fluctuations which are not only uncertain in energy but are also uncertain in location. And those fluctuations are redshifted or blueshifted relative to the observer, and so relativity is preserved.
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