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?
Sssssh! You'll spoil their proposal for a research grant!
Time dilation is strong with this one...
Ezekiel 23:20
I don't think they are proposing shooting a laser at a black hole (that might make it mad). The researchers are proposing a mechanism similar to what happens in a laser as a possible method for preserving information as it is simultaneously swallowed by the black hole. The problem remaining to be solved is one of figuring out if some of the radiation leaving the event horizon is produced by this process as opposed to a random process. In one case, information is preserved. In the other, not (no information was present to begin with).
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
There was a theory that protons behave as subatomic black holes. Electrons can spin round them but can't enter. Just ionize some hydrogen gas, chill it down to near absolute zero to get an Einstein-Bose condensate and zap it with the lasers, then measure the returned signal.
http://www.energydigital.com/g...
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron
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
why even bother shooting it in a black hole. just shoot it NOT towards anything. then, when you need the data, just travel ahead of the beam and then read the data as it hits your sensor. of course, this is a read-once method for data retrieval.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
You can't get a straightforward Bose-Einstein condensate with protons, because they are fermions, while BECs form from bosons (which follow Bose statistics, the named after the same person BECs are named after too). You can form a ferimonic condensate, where the fermions pair off to form pairs that act like bosons, but those pairs are much larger physically than the constituent particles.
That said, the structure of protons are probed on vary small scales quite regularly, as that is essentially what is done by any proton based particle accelerator. The problem with claiming the proton is a black hole is that you would need a rather complicated if not convoluted theory that wouldn't resemble general relativity and black holes at all. The forces involved don't look anything like gravity, and you have to account for the very detailed, quantitative measurements made about the structure of a proton as it doesn't look like a symmetric point particle.
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.
I saw on CNN that a black hole may have swallowed up flight 370 --about 2 minutes in. So the physicists may be luck.
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
No, in that same video, an expert explained, "a small black hole would have swallowed up our entire universe, so we know it's not that". Thank god we have experts to clarify issues like that.
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.
And why exactly is it so impossible for matter to become an indistinguishable state? Why can't entropy go down in such extreme conditions? Sure, all our experiments in relatively low gravity seemed to conserve "information", but what gives us the right to extrapolate that to black holes?
It's not like the second law of thermodynamics is really a law anyway. It just says that normally, entropy is so unlikely to decrease spontaneously that, for all intents and purposes, we may safely assume it never does. As long as the system is big enough, because violations of this "law" are already causing trouble in nanotechnology. If only a few atoms are involved, nothing keeps the entropy of the system from decreasing every now and then. But for large enough collections of atoms, sure, they are very unlikely to suddenly organise themselves, temperature difference are very unlikely to evolve the "wrong" way, etcetera. In the kind of conditions we have been able to observe so far.
But black holes... I can readily imagine them destroying information, in fact it seems extremely likely to me that they do, from an intuitive point of view. So why are scientists having such a big problem with that? Sure, entropy always increases in sufficiently large "normal" systems but black holes are anything but normal. I really don't see any compelling reason for them to conserve entropy.
Aaaand this is the most internet thing that has ever been said.
No no no, for a dish like that, you would use linguine with a cream+wine sauce, not spaghetti.
Now, if you want a red sauce, you'd make something more like a cioppino.
Do you people now know anything? ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Doh. "s/ now/ not/g"
Punchline fail. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Yeah, but the formula used to compress pi down to one bit sucks at compressing e.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Forget small black holes. There's a supermassive black hole right in our galaxy.
The Wire asks astronomers about it.