Found this excellent series of articles on Quanta:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/hologram-within-a-hologram-hints-at-solution-to-black-hole-information-paradox-20191119/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/newfound-wormhole-allows-information-to-escape-black-holes-20171023/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/wormhole-entanglement-and-the-firewall-paradox-20150424/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-origin-of-time-bootstrapped-from-fundamental-symmetries-20191029/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hole-singularities-are-as-inescapable-as-expected-20191202/
New ways to show how information that falls into black holes is saved and a new construct for a traversable black hole
The flurry of findings started last year with a paper that reported the first traversable wormhole that doesn’t require the insertion of exotic material to stay open. Instead, according to Ping Gao and Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University and Aron Wall of Stanford University, the repulsive negative energy in the wormhole’s throat can be generated from the outside by a special quantum connection between the pair of black holes that form the wormhole’s two mouths. When the black holes are connected in the right way, something tossed into one will shimmy along the wormhole and, following certain events in the outside universe, exit the second. Remarkably, Gao, Jafferis and Wall noticed that their scenario is mathematically equivalent to a process called quantum teleportation, which is key to quantum cryptography and can be demonstrated in laboratory experiments.
John Preskill, a black hole and quantum gravity expert at Caltech, says the new traversable wormhole comes as a surprise, with implications for the black hole information paradox and black hole interiors. “What I really like,” he said, “is that an observer can enter the black hole and then escape to tell about what she saw.” This suggests that black hole interiors really exist, he explained, and that what goes in must come out.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/newfound-wormhole-allows-information-to-escape-black-holes-20171023/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-disprove-conjecture-made-to-save-black-holes-20180517/
early 40 years after it was proposed, mathematicians have settled one of the most profound questions in the study of general relativity. In a paper posted online last fall, mathematicians Mihalis Dafermos and Jonathan Luk have proven that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, which concerns the strange inner workings of black holes, is false.
“I personally view this work as a tremendous achievement — a qualitative jump in our understanding of general relativity,” emailed Igor Rodnianski, a mathematician at Princeton University.
The strong cosmic censorship conjecture was proposed in 1979 by the influential physicist Roger Penrose. It was meant as a way out of a trap. For decades, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity had reigned as the best scientific description of large-scale phenomena in the universe. Yet mathematical advances in the 1960s showed that Einstein’s equations lapsed into troubling inconsistencies when applied to black holes. Penrose believed that if his strong cosmic censorship conjecture were true, this lack of predictability could be disregarded as a mathematical novelty rather than as a sincere statement about the physical world.
“Penrose came up with a conjecture that basically tried to wish this bad behavior away,” said Dafermos, a mathematician at Princeton University.
This new work dashes Penrose’s dream. At the same time, it fulfills his ambition by other means, showing that his intuition about the physics inside black holes was correct, just not for the reason he suspected.
Roger Penrose proposed the strong cosmic censorship conjecture to restore predictability to Einstein’s equations. The conjecture says that the Cauchy horizon is a figment of mathematical thought. It might exist in an idealized scenario where the universe contains nothing but a single rotating black hole, but it can’t exist in any real sense.
The reason, Penrose argued, is that the Cauchy horizon is unstable. He said that any passing gravitational waves should collapse the Cauchy horizon into a singularity — a region of infinite density that rips space-time apart. Because the actual universe is rippled with these waves, a Cauchy horizon should never occur in the wild.
As a result, it’s nonsensical to ask what happens to space-time beyond the Cauchy horizon because space-time, as it’s regarded within the theory of general relativity, no longer exists. “This gives one a way out of this philosophical conundrum,” said Dafermos.
This new work shows, however, that the boundary of space-time established at the Cauchy horizon is less singular than Penrose had imagined.
To Save a Black Hole
Dafermos and Luk, a mathematician at Stanford University, proved that the situation at the Cauchy horizon is not quite so simple. Their work is subtle — a refutation of Penrose’s original statement of the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, but not a complete denial of its spirit.
Building on methods established a decade ago by Christodoulou, who was Dafermos’s adviser in graduate school, the pair showed that the Cauchy horizon can indeed form a singularity, but not the kind Penrose anticipated. The singularity in Dafermos and Luk’s work is milder than Penrose’s — they find a weak “light-like” singularity where he had expected a strong “space-like” singularity. This weaker form of singularity exerts a pull on the fabric of space-time but doesn’t sunder it. “Our theorem implies that observers crossing the Cauchy horizon are not torn apart by tidal forces. They may feel a pinch, but they are not torn apart,” said Dafermos in an email.
Because the singularity that forms at the Cauchy horizon is in fact milder than predicted by the strong cosmic censorship conjecture, the theory of general relativity is not immediately excused from considering what happens inside. “It still makes sense to define the Cauchy horizon because one can, if one wishes, continuously extend the space-time beyond it,” said Harvey Reall, a physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Dafermos and Luk prove that space-time extends beyond the Cauchy horizon. They also prove that from the same starting point, it can extend in any number of ways: Past the horizon “there are many such extensions that one could entertain, and there is no good reason to prefer one to the other,” said Dafermos.
Yet — and here’s the subtlety in their work — these nonunique extensions of space-time don’t mean that Einstein’s equations go haywire beyond the horizon.