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In the 1970s, Hawking and colleagues showed that black hole horizons behave thermodynamically for stationary scenarios. More recently, ordinary surfaces, away from horizons, were conjectured to behave thermodynamically, forming the key assumption in the emergent gravity program. With such a thermodynamic assumption, the full Einstein field equations were derived.
To test whether this thermodynamic assumption is consistent with canonical general relativity, we generalized the original analysis of Bardeen, Carter and Hawking to ordinary surfaces (instead of horizons) in the stationary setting. Our key result from this work is that ordinary surfaces cannot generally obey the first law of thermodynamics. Therefore, the thermodynamic assumption made by the emergent gravity program is inconsistent with general relativity. Having performed this generalization beyond the black hole horizon places us in an ideal position to extend black hole thermodynamics to dynamical spacetimes. Indeed, all astrophysical black holes are dynamic and keep interacting with other astrophysical objects. So we begin to attempt to generalize black hole thermodynamics to fully dynamical spacetimes.
Contact:
Naomi Cramer | cramer@uleth.ca | (403) 329-2280 | ulethbridge.ca/artsci/physics-astronomy
