The Information Paradox of Black Holes

[Dominic]

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This shook up the scientific community because it goes against one of the basic tenets of physics: information does not just "go away." The particles of the universe will always remain, no matter what form they take.


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No it didn't "shake up" anything. It was seen as a problem with the current working theory, that something was certainly amiss and needed more work to clear up. In general the basic Standard Model + General Relativity model of the universe is incredibly accurate for almost every phenomenon in the universe; there are however a few very extreme cases where the physics isn't completely worked out and more work needs to be done.

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If Hawking's equation is correct, then cause and effect is meaningless and the universe is basically chaos. Naturally, a lot of scientists do not feel this could be true even while agreeing that Hawking's equation is simply elegant.


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That's a preposterous conclusion. Even if black holes did do something bizarre to information (which they probably don't) that doesn't invalidate the physical laws across the universe.


In the real world, there has been a lot of work on the entropy (information content) of "quantum hair" on black holes. I'm not sure what the latest results are but there is no "paradox".

Certainly black holes are one of the cases where the difficulty of merging quantum field theory with gravity come into play. That doesn't invalidate either of those theories, we already know that they are only models which are accurate within certain domains.


ps. this is why non-scientists shouldn't be allowed to have opinions on scientific matters such as global warming, stem cell research, corn ethanol, evolution, or any of the other scientific issues that they completely misunderstand and make horrible policies about.

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I didn't make my own conclusions. The information you quoted is both from the TV special I watched, as well my doing a quick google research on The Information Paradox. I haven't made any assumptions, I'm just relaying information that I thought was interesting. I'd be even more interested in hearing pros and cons on them by someone who knows what they are talking about - like yourself, perhaps.

[Dominic]

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Dom if you like these type of shows I highly recommend "The Universe" on The History Channel

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I've been watching that as well...is the Science Channel new or something? I don't remember seeing it before...pretty cool channel.

[xxThe_Lebowskixx]

when i saw the words Dom and black hole, i was expecting a completely different post.

[daryn]

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when i saw the words Dom and black hole, i was expecting a completely different post.

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you win

[tubasteve]

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Dom if you like these type of shows I highly recommend "The Universe" on The History Channel

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I've been watching that as well...is the Science Channel new or something? I don't remember seeing it before...pretty cool channel.

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ive had it on digital cable for at least a year.

[josh_x]

good use of pics op

and information can never disappear because god has a perfect memory

[Borodog]

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What he figured out from this is that information is not in fact lost in a black hole, rather, it is "spread" across the Event Horizon and does not "go away."

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It always struck me how obvious this was in retrospect. As you observe something approach the event horizon of a black hole, you observe time slow down for it. In fact, you never actually see the object cross the event horizon; rather, you see it approaching infinitely close as time slows down and stops just as it reaches the horizon; meanwhile the light from it is redshifted to infinite wavelength and it appears to disapper. But it should still be there; compressed into an infinitely thin layer on the surface of the black hole.

So the information is there, on the surface, and since nothing ever really reaches any infinitudes, it's still always theoretically accessible.

But I have to wonder what is wrong about my understanding of the subject. Since if I find it that "obvious" and Stephen [censored] Hawking disagreed for decades, well I must be [censored] wrong, right?

This effect, where time slows down for objects falling into black holes and they never actually cross the event horizon, is the source of the "anti-gravity" solution to the Einstein equations that came out recently, if I understand correctly. Picture a black hole moving through space as it sweeps up some object in front of it. The object can never reach the event horizon, which means that as the black holes sweeps it up, it must actually push it forward in the direction of travel, in front of the horizon. The only force available to do this of course is gravity; hence moving gravitational sources seem to generate an anti-gravity "beam" in their direction of travel. If I remember correctly, they talked about using a stellar mass black hole moving at a small fraction of the speed of light to boost a spacecraft up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

If only one had a stellar mass black hole moving at a small fraction of the speed of light.

[kurosh]

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Scientists should stick to science, and stay out of political matters such as global warming, stem cell research, corn ethanol, evolution, or any of the other political issues that they try to hijack. Comment as citizens, but drop the psuedo science justifications for their positions.

[/ QUOTE ]I thought this was a level but guids responded seriously to it. Please explain how global warming and evolution are "political matters."

[AZK]

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ps. this is why non-scientists shouldn't be allowed to have opinions on scientific matters such as global warming, stem cell research, corn ethanol, evolution, or any of the other scientific issues that they completely misunderstand and make horrible policies about.

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lol...."If you are not an expert, please don't think about it." Get off your high horse. He made a post about a extremely complex topic that he didn't fully understand. Few do. You find the same kind of thing in the strategy forums on here...posts from people who are *gasp* trying to learn about something new by stating their thoughts based on the information they do have. That should be encouraged, not trampled upon.

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While I agree he might have been harsh to the op, I do agree with his senitments concerning non-scientists involving themselves in scientific problems. We would be in a much better place if politicians allowed scientists to design poicy around scientific problems rather than politicians reading some summary about which they know or care nothing about.

[jafeather]

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While I agree he might have been harsh to the op, I do agree with his senitments concerning non-scientists involving themselves in scientific problems.

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I, too, agree that non-experts aligning themselves with certain sides of a extraordinarily complex debate can be troublesome. On the political level (the majority of this phenomenon that we are presented with comes from Congress and the media), it is an unfortunate byproduct of the organization of our system of government.

There is a vast difference, however, between non-scientists "involving themselves in" and "shouldn't be allowed to have opinions on" scientific matters.

Perhaps I just took the first response I replied to a bit too literally.