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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."
So I can't even wipe my drives by throwing them into a black hole?!? Grumble... (fires up microwave)
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Continua are so much prettier mathematically though. Couldn't quantisation just be an artifact of a closed universe i.e. standing wave modes in a finitely sized continuum ? Quantum theory is so damn *ugly* compared to GR and its extensions (Kaluza-Klein, Einstein-Cartan). Sigh.
I was under the impression that due to the relativistic effects, stuff (photons, matter, information, whatever) wasn't so much destroyed by a black hole as indefinitely delayed, owing to the massive bending of space-time by the singularity. Or do they mean by "eventually" what I mean: it might eventually come out, but the time it takes approaches infinity.
Wow, I can't wait to see how the writers of The Big Bang Theory will use this new theory to move Leonard's and Penny's love story along. Maybe Sheldon will make an oblique reference to it?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Black holes, however, are not "hairy" either. That is to say, a black hole can be entirely characterized by its position/velocity/acceleration, mass, charge, and rotation. There is (literally) no other definable characteristic of a black hole besides these things.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Does that mean that there's the slightest probability to unsee goatse and live a normal life again?
It is a pity that, after they fire up the Large Hadron Collider, we won't survive to hear Hawking's reluctant admission that tiny black holes don't evaporate.
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.
Also, $100 on Kaku. I don't know why, but I suspect he knows jujutsu....
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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."
Let me propose the newest addition to the laws of thermodynamics:
Information can not be destroyed.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
How the hell would you know if it did?
...eciton dluow enoyna
Circumcision is child abuse.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The quantum unit of information is a "ficton".
The rest of the jokes write themselves.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So, then, once you go black... you can go back?
In 1687, Isaac Newton wrote is Principia, which defined about half of calculus, and all of Newtonian physics - defining laws of both gravity, and inertia. It is understandable, then with no understanding of quantum mechanics at all, that he did not explicitly mention quantum monkeys at all.
Maxwell then went on to explain Ether as a medium through which light traveled in 1878, later being disproved in 1881 by Michelson, and laying the groundwork for the discovery of quantum monkeys though the discovery of constant velocity light.
This was established as mathematically sound in Einstein's theory of special relativity in 1905. General relativity, which explained gravitational effects on light and particles/waves moving fractionally close to the speed of light, was finally established in 1915 by Hilbert and Einstein, surprisingly without mention of quantum monkeys, despite all indications.
Because of this work, as well as the basics of quantum mechanics established by Einstein, various scientists were able to find the six quarks: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Charmed and Strange, the last (top) only having been confirmed in a laboratory in 1995. Strangely, however, none of the various experiments which identified quarks also identified quantum monkeys, which would have been readily observable through their quantum-picking-fleas-off-other-quantum-monkey gatherings.
The first of these discoveries, in the early 1960s made possible a formalization of a unified model in 1970-73 of four fundamental forces, three of which can be unified mathematically under one theory and with particles that are at least indirectly observable (electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear), and a fourth which doesn't quite fit (gravity). Despite these obvious problems, no one started looking at the quantum banana-eating by quantum monkeys as a possible unifying factor.
To establish a unified theory including gravity, scientists are currently using strings, rather than monkeys, as a unifying element. However, the majority of these theories are neither testable nor useful for the advancement of mankind. None of them so much as mention quantum poo, or postulate that quantum monkeys could have thrown it.
To this day, the world waits for scientists start to seek out the quantum monkeys that have so long waited for proper credit to be given to them for unifying quantum forces. So we wait still, a working unified theory still out of our grasp.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
...but fly in the face of Einsteinian relativity.
Sounds like God is a little grumpy about Einstein's letter coming out.
and the event horizon of Chuck Norris is infinity.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
1)You can't win. 2)You can't break even. 3)You can't quit.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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.
That means I'm gonna get my missing-paired socks back!
Table-ized A.I.
My patent on garbage disposal using blackholes is now worthless.
No, its worthless because you signed the patent application "Anonymous Coward".
Table-ized A.I.
Does that mean that there's the slightest probability to unsee goatse and live a normal life again?
Then we could relive the sinister joy of exposing you to it for the first time over and over.
Table-ized A.I.
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.)
It's interesting they are only just realizing it. Thermodynamic folks have had to deal with a related issue for a long time.
Almost everything interesting in thermo has to do with a phase transitition popping up somewhere.
THe funny thing is this. There are no phase transitions in the real world. THey only occur on paper continuuum models. However there are a lot of things that look awfully like phase transitions so they are useful to think about.
What am I babbling about. Well phase transitions happen at places where infinite derivatives occur in mappings. And that's all fine on paper where you have an infinite number of states. If you think of states as being something like basis vectors then it' like saying you can write a fourier transform of a square edge with a continuum of frequencies.
But since there's only a finite number of states available to any system, you dont have enough basis vectors to describe a discountinuty.
So phase transitions dont' exist technically speaking. There's always some transition zone around the edge of the transition.
I think this is what they are talking about here.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I can get the information back from /dev/null. My compression scheme does work. Time to take over the world!
But if you live in a 3-d world then having a bunch of 2-d simmulations is like have a ream of paper. 500 sheets of paper stack up nicely and consume very little of our 3-d world.
in 6-d our 3-d world is a trivial piece of it and computers can easily simmulate it.
No the problem is that there's not an algebraic solution to any polynomial greater than fifth order. Thus they wind up having to numerically approximate the mappings from 6D and this has round off errors from the finite bit floating point representation in Exel 6D.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At least to our present level of understanding, yes. Experience has shown that in hindsight indivisible units aren't.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
size == momentum (incorporated in mass & rotation);
"origin" is not a distinct physical characteristic, especially *if* information cannot be extracted from the black hole;
estimated life-span is likewise not a distinct physical characteristic, but depends on the evaporation rate of the 'hole, which may be obtained from the mass and rotation (which give the mass-to-surface-area ratio simply in the case of no rotation, and more complicatedly in the case of non-zero rotation).
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?
Due to the researcher's quote, I move this story be tagged "thereisnospoon" . Join me! :)
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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.
I am afraid that we have to say goodbye to one of the great memes of physics, namely, "black holes don't have hair." This statement, we are sure now, is simply incorrect. A black hole is defined by far more that spin, charge and mass.
Mondern Thermodynamics, Information Theory and after a bitter battle event Quantium Mechanics and GR have admited that black holes indeed do have hair. Even Hawkins has given up this battle and admitted he was wrong. (sidenote: It is an interesting story how Hawkins would say he he proved this point in a recent paper. Many physicsts dispute his version of events as it was already obvious which way the wind was blowing and regard Hawkins paper as a refolumation of the results from the work of others in the above sciences - and not even the most useful formulation at that).
As the artical says what goes in to the black hole will eventually escape or to put it in another more correct way, the information concerning the state of the matter and light that once *fell* in to the BH will become available to the universe again at some, possible distant, point in the future.
I have a feeling the meme "black holes don't have hair" is so atractive and addictive we will be living with and debunking it on slashdot for many years to come but lets be very clear, black holes do have hair.
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.
an approximation of reality.
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
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.
Seems to me that part of the problem is that Newton's basic axioms about space, time, etc., are flawed; and that although Einstein resolved some of the problems, he did not address the basic structure of Newton's one-dimensional notion of time, etc.
If the axioms are different, then the theory is inevitably different. Some of you yonger SlashDotters may not have read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." At the time it was written, Kuhn did a trenchant job of describing how axiomatic changes influence the entire epistemological infrastructure of scientific theory.
Aboriginal Indigenous understanding of time, for example, is nonlinear (and not just in the sense of being curved as a part of the space-time continuum in relationship with gravity).
A lot of people dismiss Indigenous knowledge - there are quite a few negative stereotypes about us - but at least some of our science / ways-of-being are very thoroughly grounded in the astute observation, mindful / brilliantly aware interaction with the world (i.e. a parallel of scientific experimentation), and wisdom of countless millennia.
FFI, the current draft of Chapter 2 of my (in process) Ph.D. dissertation has a discussion of some of the axiomatic limitations of contemporary scientific world-views (linked to http://www.maquah.blogspot.com/ ).
I'm still working on it; and am interested in discussing it.
Totally hawt babe: Hi! What's up?
Scientist: Uh.. I have the results of our latest cultural analysis.
Totally hawt babe: Yeah that's why I'm here! What's next for me?
Scientist: Well.. we have to have a one night stand. Possibly two nights, the data is currently a bit unclear.
Totally hawt babe: Let me see that!
Scientist: You know that's against the rules! Security! Take this woman to my living quarters!
which is totally what she said
Would you say you are a "believer" in gravity too? Those just seems to be a strange choice of words to me if you consider the theory of evolution to be valid, and you think God doesn't exist. How can you be a "committed atheist", does it involve the difficult task of making sure you don't go to church on sunday, don't ever read the bible and never accidentally exclaim "oh, God/Jesus/Buddha/Allah!" if something horrific happens in front of you?
It sounds like you are being just as religious as religious people. I'm not saying that any higher power or intelligence in the Universe would necessarily conform to anything that people currently consider to be God, but it seems to me that the only way you can be "committed" is by purposely ignoring any ideas that involve any higher forms of existence. Generically sweeping away certain ideas just because you have committed yourself to a different set of beliefs seems to be a bit foolish. As someone who considered themself a Christian for the last decade but have recently been having doubts and exploring other ideas because of the growing evidence support evolutionary theory, and just some of my own internal conflicts, I'm definitely not being hypocritical by saying that
which is totally what she said