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Lasers May Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox
astroengine writes: "In an effort to help solve the black hole information paradox that has immersed theoretical physics in an ocean of soul searching for the past two years, two researchers have thrown their hats into the ring with a novel solution: Lasers. Technically, we're not talking about the little flashy devices you use to keep your cat entertained, we're talking about the underlying physics that produces laser light and applying it to information that falls into a black hole. According to the researchers, who published a paper earlier this month to the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (abstract), the secret to sidestepping the black hole information paradox (and, by extension, the 'firewall' hypothesis that was recently argued against by Stephen Hawking) lies in stimulated emission of radiation (the underlying physics that generates laser light) at the event horizon that is distinct from Hawking radiation, but preserves information as matter falls into a black hole."
Throw your storage devices into a black hole, and make sure that your data gets preserved for eternity.
Coming soon, the ability to retrieve the data from the event horizon should it be required again.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
how far is the nearest black hole? i mean, they would have to shoot the "laser"(read as dr Evil) and wait how long for the laser to reach the black hole? It should be some years. then, another years to receive the data from that black hole. is that correct?
Time dilation is strong with this one...
Ezekiel 23:20
What's the friken' shark feel like when he falls into the black hole?
Somebody notify PETA so they can put an end to these horrible experiments.
Sharks at the event horizon eat everything falling in and may emit laser light.
used to be the preferred method of data reduction.
It's probably nothing to do with black holes, but one of the pioneers of solid-state lasers was on The Life Scientific this morning. If it's available in your area it's well worth a listen.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
What we all want is spaghettified laser sharks. Amiright!?
The information has to contain *all* the information about the matter falling in. It's essentially the scanner side of a Star Trek transporter.
A fire, a steam roller or a grinder would obliterate most everything, never mind information, yet if thrown into a black hole it's saves it? No NSA needed?
Since I and surely others have seen this many times, an explanation, say at the undergraduate physics level or better yet with a car analogy would be highly appreciated. "Duh, the compactor crushes the car, but the black hole..."
Well done.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
What's the friken' shark feel like when he falls into the black hole?
I mean, he's scared at first...who wouldn't be? But as long as you sling some tuna in behind him, it's turtles all the way down.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"Throw your storage devices into a black hole and preserve your information forever." No backups necessary? So, how do you retrieve that file you lost that says you are the inheritor of a serious fortune? :-)
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
The information absorbed from the matter that falls into the black hole must correspond to something existent, and given that nothing can be created or destroyed, even if something passes the event horizon, the corresponding information must remain. There must be an infinity of information dwelling in the nothingness of the cosmos! How else would we be able to be philodoxers? Since philodoxy cannot conceive of nothing, it necessarily follows that, in virtue of the mass doxaston, that there is an infinity of information. And it will be all at our fingertips.
Lasers May Solve the Black Hole Information Paradox
!! But, but -- how do we get the sharks into the black hole? I didn't think they fly! ... Hmm, I guess we'll first have to evolve them into intelligent sapient spaceship-flying beings before we fling them headfirst into a black hole. (Or tailfirst? Which way should the laser point?)
Ob
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
when i was a child in a library dating back to 1920s where a stranded astronaut is in the asteroid belt, with no radio coms, so he gets clever and uses small rocks, thrown into a conveniently close blackhole to morse code an sos. on the theory that x-ray pulses of the matter implosions would reach earth and rescue. they knew in 1920 that xrays can escape a blackhole or someone theorized it.
Is there any empirical evidence that information can't be destroyed?
If not, what would be the consequences of just ditching the law(?) that creates the paradox?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The term "black hole" didn't get used until the late 60s, at which point x-rays from Cygnus X-1 was already observed and theoretical work on accretion disks was already started (although the connection between the two took until the early 70s to solidify using better observations from a satellite instead of sounding rockets). The older concept of a dark star wasn't considered completely black though, and was known long before the 1900s to possibly emit light, but it is a rather difference concept that disappeared with GR.
Any particle that contains mass and energy (so basically all of them) that passes into a black hole does so at a slight angle. That changes the rotation just slightly on one direction. That alone may preserve information about what fell in. That theory is 10+ years old and still the most correct and provable. People just don't like how there's a 2 dimensional arc of possible entry vectors for any given particle so its "information" can't be reversed flawlessly to one single answer.
Not the 1920s but that was a short story by Azimov called "Old Fashioned" published in 1976 I believe.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Sharks with hard drives riding laser beams into black holes
What's the friken' shark feel like when he falls into the black hole?
Probably a lot like a whale or a pot of petunias would in the same situation.
it depends on the size of the black hole. if its small, it'd be ripped to shreds by gravitational forces pretty early on, or possibly even incinerated by the hypothetical firewall. for a black hole large enough that the gravitational effects dont instantly spaghetti-fi it (and assuming no hypothetical firewall), it wouldnt notice anything different upon crossing over the event horizon until they were already quite a ways closer to the singularity (some black hole visualizations).
so really, it wouldnt really notice anything until it gravity shredded it.
If the theory is { ... and the cat is both dead and alive in the informational sense... ... during the whole moment of the black holes existence.
a black hole represents a collapse of spacetime at least up to the atomic level
} then {
1. you lose the notions of localization and temporalization as a result of the spacetime continuum being collapsed. This collapse is similar to the way mathematical equations can lose some significance when two infinities cancel.
2. dwelling on this absence of temporalization {
2.1 Anything thrown into the black hole was/is _always_ encoded in the information that exists defining the black hole, even before it was actually thrown in because, unlike our version of schrodinger's cat experiment, the lack of temporalization means the box is always open _if_ the observer ever ended the experiment by opening it...
2.2
2.3
2.4
}
3. dwelling on the absence of localization { ...regardless of whether the boot was thrown into the black hole or not.
3.1 The information that represents the boot is absolutely conserved within the singularity as long as the boot actually existed for at least a single moment...
3.2
}}
I really don't see the point to the whole theory. First, if we used every electron in the universe, we could store more data than the universe can account for via data compression.
A black hole simply compresses the data infinately. (yeah that is a joke).
But I can truely destroy data by further compressing it in a way that can't be reversed. It's easy to do. Take any number, say 42. Now lets compress it down to a 3. Unless you maintain the exact formula you used to reduce it downb to those two bits, then you have no way of reversing it back to 42. As a result, the data is destroyed.
From the paper: "Note that as 2m anti-particles are stimulated behind the horizon in region II, particle number is conserved. We should also point out that because the incident particle carries energy and momentum, the black hole does not have to donate mass in order to allow the emission of stimulated pairs, as it does for virtual pairs." While stimulated emission of photons plays a big role in this, it is not really the physics of lasers.
That as matter falls towards the black hole time slows, and since it can never be observed entering the black hole the information just ends up getting "smeared" along the event horizon?