Entropy creation inside black holes points to observer complementarity

TL;DR

This paper investigates entropy production inside large black holes and supports observer complementarity by showing individual observers perceive less entropy than the Bekenstein-Hawking limit, despite enormous total entropy.

Contribution

It demonstrates that observer complementarity can reconcile large entropy production with black hole entropy limits through non-local identifications.

Findings

Individual observers see less than Bekenstein-Hawking entropy

Total entropy exceeds black hole degrees of freedom

Supports observer complementarity as a resolution

Abstract

Heating processes inside large black holes can produce tremendous amounts of entropy. Locality requires that this entropy adds on space-like surfaces, but the resulting entropy (10^10 times the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy in an example presented in the companion paper) exceeds the maximum entropy that can be accommodated by the black hole's degrees of freedom. Observer complementarity, which proposes a proliferation of non-local identifications inside the black hole, allows the entropy to be accommodated as long as individual observers inside the black hole see less than the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. In the specific model considered with huge entropy production, we show that individual observers do see less than the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, offering strong support for observer complementarity.