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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.
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.
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!
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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.
> 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.