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Black Hole Information Paradox Solved

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Log4Girlz

Member
So... trying to understand 'information' here... what is the difference between the information about the physical state of an object and the physical object itself?

Really simply though

Quantum Mechanics sez the information about the physical state of the object isn't destroyed in a black hole

General Relativity sez it is

Hawking says the information instead gets stuck on the Event Horizon and can even escape through Hawking radiation but it's all messed up.

I'd like to see what kind of experiment they devise from the new theory.

The information being useless and unreadable is the same as it being lost. Nothing is resolved.
 
Yeah this has been around for a few decades. The Holographic Principle (not a theory) was formalized by Gerald t'Hooft and Leonard Susskind built upon it.

However, Stephen Hawking was very much against this idea, having a debate with Susskind about it ( in a book called The Black Hole Wars).

So, lol at Hawking being given the credit for an idea he vehemently rejected these past couple of decades.

I thought this thread was a joke honestly
 

eot

Banned
You can think of "information" as the all the literal physical information of a particle of matter. It's position, spin, speed and etc at any given time.

When a particle falls into a black hole, general relativity says that the information of that particle is necessarily destroyed. Quantum theory tells us, though, that the information of a particle can never be destroyed. Physicists were keen to ignore this paradox because the nature of a black holes singularity was at the extreme edges of physics. Perhaps there was some solution that would present itself. This came to a head when Hawking proposed a theory of Black Hole radiation that could only be explained if information about the radiated particle were destroyed. The mechanical process behind Hawking Radiation is generally accepted... but so is the idea of information retention in quantum mechanics, thus the paradox.

Just a small correction, hawking radiation is the source of the paradox. It is the mechanism by which a pure quantum state is (seemingly) transferred into a mixed state. If black holes didn't evaporate, the information would be trapped but not necessarily destroyed. Since they do evaporate however, the information released in that process needs to add up to the information originally sent in, and that's the issue.

The ELI5 version is basically, black holes aren't deterministic because if you throw in 1 kg lemons or 1 kg oranges you get the same thing out, and it'd be impossible to reconstruct what was thrown in.
 

Yagharek

Member
We couldn't possibly know. That's the whole point.

Susskind's resolution of the paradox called for an analog of wave-particle duality, only in a different sense.

To a person watching from a distance someone fall through a (supermassive) black hole event horizon, they get destroyed and slowly smeared across the event horizon.

To the person falling through, they are at free fall, in a low-curvature, uniform gravitational field so they don't get stretched into spaghetti or compressed. Instead (radiation aside) they would pass harmlessly through the event horizon and not even notice when exactly it happened.

So for one person, the person is destroyed, but for that person themselves, they are still ok.

Susskind's resolution was that both realities are correct.
 

marrec

Banned
Just a small correction, hawking radiation is the source of the paradox. It is the mechanism by which a pure quantum state is (seemingly) transferred into a mixed state. If black holes didn't evaporate, the information would be trapped but not necessarily destroyed. Since they do evaporate however, the information released in that process needs to add up to the information originally sent in, and that's the issue.

The ELI5 version is basically, black holes aren't deterministic because if you throw in 1 kg lemons or 1 kg oranges you get the same thing out, and it'd be impossible to reconstruct what was thrown in.

I had thought that black hole evaporation was a generally accepted theory before Hawking Radiation was proposed.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
I had thought that black hole evaporation was a generally accepted theory before Hawking Radiation was proposed.

As is usually the case in science, the origins are somewhat hazy and it depends on where you draw the boundary. Hawking wasn't the first to propose that black holes should emit particles, but I believe he was the first to formalise the suggestion.
 

marrec

Banned
As is usually the case in science, the origins are somewhat hazy and it depends on where you draw the boundary. Hawking wasn't the first to propose that black holes should emit particles, but I believe he was the first to formalise the suggestion.

Trivialities I suppose.

Either way, the new proposal by Hawking is akin to him meeting Susskind in the middle, even in the face of absolute defeat. :lol
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
Trivialities I suppose.

Either way, the new proposal by Hawking is akin to him meeting Susskind in the middle, even in the face of absolute defeat. :lol

Sure. Hawking became convinced that he was wrong about the paradox. He even paid out of the bet he owed to Susskind. That's how science is supposed to work.

You might also think that Gerard t'Hooft is the 'loser' her, since he's rarely mentioned in relation to the problem even though he was right there with Susskind and Hawking and did most of the groundwork for Susskind's proposed solution.

And again--the black hole information paradox is still an open problem. No solutions are generally accepted by the physics community, even if the overwhelming majority agree that information is not lost. Leonard Susskind basically showed how the problem is resolved if one accepts a string of conjectures (among them the holographic principle, as well as string theory).
 

The Technomancer

card-carrying scientician
So more or less it's similar to the philosophy of identity. Anything that can distinguish one thing from another.

Yes, basically. The idea of a black hole "destroying" information is essentially that when it crosses the event horizon it becomes utterly homogenized; the only property of whatever falls in that contributes to the state of the black hole is its mass.

I don't think this particular variation is a new theory, but if Hawking says he's got something, I'm intrigued to find out more about what it is

EDIT and charge, IIRC
 

marrec

Banned
Sure. Hawking became convinced that he was wrong about the paradox. He even paid out of the bet he owed to Susskind. That's how science is supposed to work.

You might also think that Gerard t'Hooft is the 'loser' her, since he's rarely mentioned in relation to the problem even though he was right there with Susskind and Hawking and did most of the groundwork for Susskind's proposed solution.

And again--the black hole information paradox is still an open problem. No solutions are generally accepted by the physics community, even if the overwhelming majority agree that information is not lost. Leonard Susskind basically showed how the problem is resolved if one accepts a string of conjectures (among them the holographic principle, as well as string theory).

I'm not saying anything about the science of it. It's working. What I'm saying is that Hawking's proposal doesn't solve the paradox because information is still destroyed, even if it's only "effectively" destroyed. He has obviously come around to Susskind's proposed solution but still wants the information to be destroyed in Hawking Radiation. He's trying to meet in the middle.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
I'm not saying anything about the science of it. It's working. What I'm saying is that Hawking's proposal doesn't solve the paradox because information is still destroyed, even if it's only "effectively" destroyed. He has obviously come around to Susskind's proposed solution but still wants the information to be destroyed in Hawking Radiation. He's trying to meet in the middle.

What? No. Resolving the paradox doesn't demand that you can actually, in practice recover the information, only that it isn't destroyed like GR predicts.
 

Timeaisis

Member
I don't understand how information can be an actual property, unless there's a different physics definition of information.

Do they mean like the properties of the object is preserved so it could "reassemble" itself on the other side of the black hole? In which case, wouldn't the object just be obliterated, anyway? No paradox.

I'm sorry, I don't have a doctorate in Physics. This doesn't make a lot of sense.
 
Here's one... If our thoughts and feelings can be stored as memories, what type of information is this.

Could it be similar to the 2D information stored in the Hawking Radiation/ Information realm?
 

eot

Banned
I don't understand how information can be an actual property, unless there's a different physics definition of information.

Do they mean like the properties of the object is preserved so it could "reassemble" itself on the other side of the black hole? In which case, wouldn't the object just be obliterated, anyway? No paradox.

I'm sorry, I don't have a doctorate in Physics. This doesn't make a lot of sense.

You can think of it as losing the information to reconstruct the past. If you make a black hole and study it as it evaporates, it's not possible to tell what it was made out of. It's not a practical problem, it's a fundamental one.
 
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