The postulates of black hole complementarity do not imply a firewall for infalling observers at a black hole horizon. The dynamics of the stretched horizon, that scrambles and re-emits information, determines whether infalling observers experience an
ything out of the ordinary when entering a large black hole. In particular, there is no firewall if the stretched horizon degrees of freedom retain information for a time of order the black hole scrambling time.
We develop a holographic model for thermalization following a quench near a quantum critical point with non-trivial dynamical critical exponent. The anti-de Sitter Vaidya null collapse geometry is generalized to asymptotically Lifshitz spacetime. Non
-local observables such as two-point functions and entanglement entropy in this background then provide information about the length and time scales relevant to thermalization. The propagation of thermalization exhibits similar horizon behavior as has been seen previously in the conformal case and we give a heuristic argument for why it also appears here. Finally, analytic upper bounds are obtained for the thermalization rates of the non-local observables.
