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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."
But if information can escape a black hole, that cannot be true. The information must be in there, and must be itself a characteristic of the black hole.
Great. First I learn Newton is only an approximation, atomic theory is only an approximation, Gas *laws* are an approximation and now even Einstein (who I can't understand anyway) is only an approximation as well.
Will the real reality please reveal itself!
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
How the hell would you know if it did?
Don't worry.
This too will be shown to just be an approximation which doesn't actually reflect how the universe works.
That's all physics is in the end.
Yet the existence of goatse disproves the existence of a higher power.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I clicked on the link to find out what the basic unit of information was (an informatron?) and saw the bit about Hawking changing his mind about how black holes work (I assume based on new evidence).
Given the increasing "threat" of religious propaganda (if I was an American I'd be more worried about Intelligent Design getting taught in schools than I would be about terrorists), its so awesome to see a perfect example of how scientists operate: a new, better theory comes along and the old stuff is abandoned in favour of it.
No, the binary quantum unit of information is a bit. A ficton is several orders of magnitude "smaller" than that. A bit can be true or false. A light that's on or off. A ficton is a value that represents the smallest possible division of "possibly true". The universe is not binary at a very fine scale. Things fade in and out of frame with increasing and decreasing probability in the present moment. It's only when the arrow of entropy has passed and the frame is set that a thing was or was not, from our point of view.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Or better analogy, time runs like a movie, but instead of 24 frames per second of an actual movie, real time runs about
18550000000000000000000000000000000000000000 frames per second (1/Planck Time).
And same goes for space. A HD movie on a nice TV might have 2000 pixels per meter. The space has something like 62500000000000000000000000000000000 "pixels" per meter (1/Planck Length).
(Note to viewers: Things may appear distorted if viewed from great distance or if viewed from a very fast moving car. This is due to the effects of general relativity, and does not reflect the real quality of our production. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you will enjoy the show, no matter where you are watching this.)
I suspect most physicists would rather believe that they are working towards a final description of the universe rather than just another step on an infinite progression.
Asking a physicist if the universe is infinitely complex is like asking a salesman if his product is shoddy. They both have a vested interest in the answer.
I don't understand this abhorrence of a universe in which information can be destroyed.
I realize that we're talking about quantum information, not the Library of Congress, and the preferred simplicity of the equations that describe events that work regardless of the direction (sign) of time. Why does the universe have to be built around that principle just because we like the equations?
I've heard "scary stories" (thanks, George Carlin) about "causality" issues, but AFAICT, they're only scary to those who insist on time-symmetry, not that the universe cannot function that way.
Hawking's pan-dimensional replication of information really sounds like a desperate ploy to retain a childhood fantasy by spinning elaborate webs to sustain it, rather than just asking the simpler question: how would a universe work if information can be destroyed?
Maybe, if information CAN be destroyed, it explains the apparent (at the human level, at least) directionality of time. If the universe is open, at some far-future time, when the protons, neutrons, etc, have decayed, the information of their quantum states will be gone; not transformed, gone. If the universe is closed, it will collapse back into a singularity, and again, the information will be gone. So, what?
That doesn't make sense. If eventually the universe was completely described, what use would there be for science? It would be good for one person's place in the history books to discover the Ultimate Final Secret of the Entire Universe, but boring as hell thereafter.
Probably anyone would like to make a discovery on that scale, but which world would you rather live in?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Relativistic effects cause matter/energy to be trapped (time slows down) but if black holes evaporate they will release all that matter/energy.
That releasing radiation (Hawking radiation) is a form of very pure black body radiation, so it contains nearly no information at all, hence the paradox.
Mister Ahbay Ashtekar here suggests that we are looking the problem from a wrong point of view. We should think the spacetime not as a continuum -- we should think the spacetime something that matter/energy defines.
Hawking himself is travelling in this direction. See his quite fresh paper of the subject:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0507171v2
Just because we haven't figured out the beautiful way to describe it doesn't mean it's not beautiful. I think both GR and QM are inherently beautiful for revealing to us that the universe really doesn't work at all in the way we think it does.
Perhaps that explains why we find women attractive.
Table-ized A.I.
Or, in the language of the non-scientific, "God sees all, God knows everything, God is all powerful".
Perhaps instead of condemning Christians for being unscientific, modern scientists, like Newton, should put more effort into understanding religious language!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
That's a tough choice; futility or having nothing to do next.
Then again, even if there is no end, there's always the next secret waiting, and who know what that could be? If there's no end to what we could know and what we could do, then life may take an inconceivable direction.
Even if we do discover the last secret though, there will be a million minds invested in the application of those secrets, and it's my naive hope, for the betterment of mankind.
(Also, I wanted to make a pun about black hole being black boxes, but I just don't think it's going to work out.)
Fnord.
The universe may be infinitely complex, but that does not mean it can not be described with a single mathematical formula. PI is infinite, but it can represented by the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle.
Perhaps the universe's formula is something like a fractal, with infinite complexity and depth.
an approximation of reality.
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
> You grow, shrink, and twist in 4 spatial dimensions, X/Y/Z/T.
That statement implies the existence of a second kind of time. If only x,y,z,t exist then you don't "do" anything in that four-dimensional space. You simply exist as a static four-dimensional object in a static four-dimensional universe.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The question of how complex it is is purposeless, what we are really asking is how complex is our measuring instrument, and since that measuring instrument is inside the universe we are trying to measure, it's for sure bigger than the smallest particle.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I really don't get this attitude--why is a universe that works counter to our intuitions more beautiful than one that is easy to understand? It's like the quotes from early QM people saying that the fact that the theory made no sense was what proved it was true--WTF, over?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg