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Black Holes Don't Trap Information Forever
sciencehabit writes "New calculations suggest that black holes are not a one-way street. Anything that falls into them may eventually come out. The findings lend important support to quantum gravity, but fly in the face of Einsteinian relativity. They also support Stephen Hawking's reluctant admission that information couldn't be destroyed by black holes. Penn State researcher Ahbay Ashtekar was quoted saying, 'Once we realized that the notion of space-time as a continuum is only an approximation of reality, it became clear to us that singularities are merely artifacts of our insistence that space-time should be described as a continuum.' Let the physics infighting begin."
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It's actually quite remarkable - the ONLY thing that even costs energy is destroying information.
Actually, the energies involved are so low that a black hole created would be small enough to pass between two atoms in solid matter with huge margins, so most likely it'd just zip trough earth as if it was vacuum. And given that the particles involved have energies equivalent to 99.999% of lightspeed or thereabouts, you'd have to be IMPOSSIBLY precise to NOT have a velocity higher than 11km/s. In short, if the holes didn't evaporate, they'd simply zip trough earth and leave for outer space, more likely than not never swallowing even a single electron, and doing no damage whatsoever.
It was once thought that chuck norris has a black hole under his beard, but it was just a big pussy.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I wouldn't call quantum theory ugly, just counter-intuitive, and that, I think, comes from the fact that at our magnification level, we don't see anything that behaves quite like anything at quantum level.
The most insightful thing I've ever read on that is Feynman's introduction to quantum theory:
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
They're all white (I'm not kidding). I guess Obama won't much like them. (meaning hawking radiation is white, much more "white" btw than any "white" light you've ever seen)
It's just such a faint white that you'd swear it's black.
Different points of space are not synchronized. Besides, there are more pixels than that, because the positions are not precise. TV screen analogy doesn't work. I also think that you've misunderstood the Planck units a bit. While they may be the limits of observation, it doesn't mean that the space itself is limited by the units - uncertainty prevails. The number of possible positions the space-time can take far surpasses the numbers you present.
You remind me of what Lord Kelvin was telling his students 100 years ago. Something like: "I'm sad for you, since the Physics is now complete" . Just after that sentence, quantum physics and relativity were discovered ;-)
Herve S.
Is it? There may be a piece of information smaller than one bit or otherwise not integer number of bits... For example, confirmation of the more probable of two possible options would be less than a bit, while choosing the less probable one would be more than a bit (but less than two)...
Considering, that humans give birth to slightly more girls than boys, announcing to your family, that your child is a female transfers (very slightly) less than a bit of information...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, Feynman said something even more apposite to the topic. I don't have the quotation handy, so I'll have to paraphrase. He observed that so long as you treated space as a continuum, then you needed an infinite amount of information to describe what is going on in any finite volume, no matter how small. He considered that counterintuitive - why should you need an infinite amount of information to describe something arbitrarily small? Gregory Chaitin put it another way, when he said that he didn't believe in real numbers. He wasn't disputing the numbers, of course, but rather that real numbers could be applied to anything real, such as space, time, mass, or energy.
Most people find their intuition works the opposite way - why should there be a limit on how finely you can chop up space? And if there is a limit, why is it one size and not another?
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
In the mean time, a reasonable stab at an intuitive understanding is that two particles of unknown state are entangled when the examination of one reveals the state of both.
The "spooky" things about entanglement are that (a) the unknown state can persist for long time intervals and (b) the quantum states of one of the particles cannot be fully described without knowing the quantum states of the other. Part of the "(b)" problem is that fully describing one particle automatically therefore fully describes the other.
Another problem is that absent full knowledge of the local piece of the entangled pair limits the amount of knowledge one has of the entire local system, possibly in significant ways (Schroedinger's cat). A remote viewer who "collapses" the pair can know about a massive local change, even if the distance is such that the remote viewer cannot communicate the full quantum state because of the fundamental information sharing speed limit (speed of light in vacuum).
In classical world, this is like having two synchronized long-running count down timers, one of which is attached to a bomb that is transported a long way away. When the local clock reaches "0", one reasonably believes that the bomb has gone off, even if the news confirming that will take some to arrive.
The difference is that in classical world there are lots of ways in which the remote bomb might not go off at all (or precisely at "local 0"). In entanglement experiments, the observation of local state invariably triggers simultaneous collapse of the remote system. There is no completely accepted explanation for this.
We don't know.
We don't know what that will do either.
No, that is not clear. If they remain entangled you simply know the full motion of the other half of the entangled pair within the black hole system. Since you don't really know anything at all about the black hole system, that doesn't really cause information leakage problems. Likewise, if dropping half of an entangled pair into a black hole breaks entanglement, there is no information problem, since you do not really know anything about the black hole system. That is, the black hole system is not really using its half of the entangled pair as a "trigger" for timing something inside or outside the black hole system.
This sort of thing was thought about with the Unruh effect and Hawking radiation. Whether the entangled partner pops out of the black hole "eventually" still entangled or not could take a very very long time to be testable in principle...
With a microscopic black hole you could throw entangled pairs at it, wait for it to evaporate, and then try to interrogate the "uneaten" halves to see if they have collapsed. This is plausible. Sean Carroll discusses this sort of quantum interrogation here: http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/02/27/quantum-interrogation/
Rephrasing:
Now we simply replace "there is a puppy in the box" with "there is one partner in an entangled pair which has been evaporated out of the MBH".
The creation of useful MBHes interacting usefully with useful fields of entangled pair halves is an exercise for the reader.