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Famous Hawking Black Hole Bet Resolved?
Mick Ohrberg writes "In 1997 the three cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist -- that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it. It now looks like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias of his choice, since physicists at Ohio State University 'have derived an extensive set of equations that strongly suggest that the information continues to exist -- bound up in a giant tangle of strings that fills a black hole from its core to its surface.'"
Is there any hard evidence that string theory is correct?
I'd be holding onto my bet a little longer I think=)
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Jimbo Wales (founder / benevolent dictator of Wikipedia) was recently approached by a major publishing company about the possibility of a printed version of Wikipedia.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Hawking has made several bets. You are thinking of his naked singularities bet (A naked singularity is a black-hole without event horizons) Hawking bet Roger Penrose(?) a subscription to Penthouse (I think) that they could not exist. He lost.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The thing about black holes emiting radiation is that they don't actually emit any radiation. Anything that enters the event horizon is gone - for good. It doesn't come back ever, even as black body radiation.
./ theoretical physisists.
The way theorists get around this is through virtual particles. Assume that virtual particle pairs are blinking in and out of existance all the time, but are never noticed because before they become 'real' particles they destroy each other (think particle/anti particle). The fun part comes when the particles appear on opposite sides of an event horizon. One gets sucked into the black hole, and the other becomes a full-fledged particle with a small chance of escapeing. Because the escapeing particle was never in the event horizon to begin with, it can contain no information from within the black hole.
Now, how the black hole doesn't gain mass from the anti-particle I'm not quite sure... I'll leave that up to all the
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A very tiny dimension all curled up on itself as opposed to extending to infinity (like we're typically familiar with). If a foam in a bubble bath is the whole universe, a bubble in the foam might be analogous to a string. Space is soap, we're not allowed to see it directly, but we can see its effect.
String theory has modest successes with some things, and monsterous problems with others. It's essentially built to explain why gravity is so weak. At distances smaller than strings gravity is as strong as all the other forces. But it doesn't overwhelm everything at large scales because gravity is the only force which can see the strings, and so it leaks off into these other dimensions untimately becoming very dilute.
The hope of theoreticall physicists is to unite gravity with the other forces, understanding everything about it's divergance, hopefully uniting quantum electro/chromodynamics with general relativity creating one theory to explain them all, and, in mathmatics, bind them.
It is often... though not often enough... pointed out that the singular of "data" is not "anecdote".
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Similarly, "fact" is not merely an emphatic form of "theory".
I might as well theorize that black holes don't exist at all; who owes what now? Oh, right, nothing changes, because theories aren't facts
Mick Ohrberg, why don't you grow out of Physics Fanboydom and take some time to learn some real stuff? For starters, why don't you being with Science 101 and learn the definition of "theory", and "equation", and other such basic terms?
I can buy that the information survives and continues to exist inside the Schwarzchild radius.
... they're going to have to explain a bit harder just how it is we're supposed to be able to extract that information back out through the event horizon. Whether it continues to vibrate on linked strings or vanishes in a puff of nonreality makes no never mind if you can't get it back out.
But when they say:
"The strings from any subsequent material that enters the black hole would remain traceable as well. That means a black hole can be traced back to its original conditions, and information survives."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Actually that was a different bet between Thorne and Hawking which Hawking conceded to Thorne years ago. It was a bet on whether Cygnus X1 was in fact a black whole. Hawking bet it wasn't and Thorne bet it was. Hawking said he really did think it was a black hole but he wanted to win something if he was wrong so as to be less depressed about it.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
"It will be a big piece of fun" (talking about deriving equations)
"thats a rather large force" (after mentioning that the force to pull two pieces of a capacitor apart could lift the city of columbus)
If you get a chance to meet him, don't pass it up. He's a great guy
Perhaps the information survives in the black hole interior. Physics infers a black hole by an event horizon, but that does not necessarily imply a singularity. On the other hand, if the interior is considered as a "universe" with its own set of physical laws and structure, this conjecture could be quite relevant.
For a somewhat handwaving explanation of what I'm talking about, take a look at this hypothesis.
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Peer review might help, but normally people attempt to recreate the experiment. That's how science weeds out "luck".
You are missing something.
Noone doubted the energy continued to exist.
The bet concerned the patten of information held by the matter/energy. The questions was if you encoded something in a patten of laser light and sent that into the black hole would the encoded information continue to exist? ( given that no record of the data sent exists except that encoded in the light. )
Google for holographic universe, it's interesting stuff.
If an anti-particle enters the black hole, it LOSES mass.
So we have these virtual particles blinking in and out of existence. One particle, one anti-particle. I understand that when an anti-particle falls into the black hole and the normal particle escapes, the black hole loses mass. Makes perfect sense.
I want to know, why don't an equal number of particles fall into the blackhole while the antiparticle escapes?
Seems you would get a 50/50 distribution leading to no mass change..
I'm sure I'm missing something. Can someone tell me what it is?
That stupid winzip. PowerArchiver has ALWAYS had BlackHole (de)compression. Good ol' .bh files. ....except they didnt look like strings..
Careful there. A simple-minded Newtonian derivation gives the correct Schwartschild radius for a black hole, despite having two deep physical flaws and relying on completely inapplicable physics. For that matter, two words: "Bode's Law."
Second: I can't see how you can possibly test any of this.
If you can't test it, then it's just a likely story. It might be a more likely story than saying little green elves did it all, but in essence, it;s not that different.
Tangles of strings - Suuuure.
As I said, it probably is true, and string theory is a lot cleaner, but damn - what are you going to do? Crack open a black hole to find out?
We. don't. think. so.
It strikes me as what Horgan calls "Ironic Science".
RS
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