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Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole
An anonymous reader writes: Physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have figured out a way for information to leave a black hole. He presented his theory today at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Scientists have struggled with the black hole information paradox for years, and Hawking thinks this new theory could be a solution. He said, "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon." Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia: You wouldn't technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you'd have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota." Information can leave the black hole via Hawking radiation, though it will be functionally useless. Hawking worked with Cambridge's Malcolm Perry and Harvard's Andrew Stromberg on this theory.
chuck norris doesn't escape from black holes.
they escape from HIM.
"Hawking's new idea is that the information doesn't make it inside the black hole at all. Instead, it's permanently encoded in a 2D hologram at the surface of the black hole's event horizon".
Uh, isn't that basically Susskind's idea? The holographic principal and all.
He doesn't look all too terribly excited about it.
Hawking in all his brilliance has produced a new paradox trying to solve another? How's that help anything? This is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
So now we have information that's "useless" because we won't be able to unscramble it, but no information is lost? It's like saying that the information on my degaussed and melted down backup disk drive is *still* there, if I just knew how to reassemble it properly. That backup disk is just a pile of slag, the information it contained is gone. I'm sorry, that sure looks like we lost information to me... The net effect is the same as the information being lost, so I don't see how this stroke of genius helps the problem beyond moving the paradox to having the information preserved but unrecoverable by any possible means.
Try again sir... You didn't solve anything here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
A particle falling into a black hole never perceives itself as having moved past an event horizon, as an apparent event horizon recedes before it. The horizon keeps receding in the direction of the "singularity" until it's torn apart on the way in.
An external observer never perceives a particle falling past the so-called "true" horizon; it perceives the falling object's time as slowing down to a virtual stop at the event horizon.
Both of these views are logically consistent under a simple constraint: nothing ever passes an event horizon, and there's no such thing as a "true" horizon, only apparent horizons. The outside observer's view of "truth" should be given no more precedence as being reality than the infalling observer's perception.
The same nothing-moves-past-the-event-horizon rule must apply to particles falling into the black hole as it's forming: they never get to reach a "singularity" either. Meaning nothing is ever in a singularity state, even that which formed the black hole itself.
As a black hole evaporates, its mass drops and its event horizon moves inward. Hence, an outside observer will perceive more of an infalling particle's progress inward, as if time is slowly being released. The infalling particle perceives no wait, just a continuous fall. Since the outside observer is seeing the infalling particle's time as moving many, many orders of magnitude slower, then for the two reference frames to be logically consistent, the amount of black hole power output perceived by the outside observer must be perceived by the infalling particle to be many, many orders of magnitude more intense. Hence it's far from black to the infalling particle, rather an intense source of radiation, growing ever more violent as the particle falls further in.
In short, all of this implies that black holes, to an outside observer, are basically a spot where time slows to a near stop, slowly leaking it out as they radiate away. To an infalling observer, he's just falling into a collapsing star that grows ever more radiatively intense as it collapses. The infalling particle, like everything else that falls into the black hole in the collapse, is blown apart by the intense radiation. But no special rules occur, no loss of information - and no singularity.
Or whatever, what do I know ;)
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Have gnu, will travel.
I remember when Hawking said that basically black holes must radiate "information" somehow.
Before that idea, the thinking was that if you could somehow reverse the direction of time, plenty of things in the universe would go in reverse but one thing that you would never see is something that went into a black hole coming back out again.
Hawking felt that this was counterintuitive, or something, and came up with this idea: something goes into a black hole, and information about that thing comes out. Somehow.
He never really described how that's supposed to happen. So, fast forward to today.
So, basically he tacked one additional sentence onto an already pretty short statement -- IMHO.
It's not all that exciting unless you're a really excitable theoretical physicist.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Who cares if information is preserved in a black hole? What purpose does it serve? What can it teach us about the universe? I'd actually like to know the answers to these questions.
But... Hawking is undoubtedly a brilliant mind. Why has he been wasting his time for years trying to decide whether or not "information is preserved in a black hole"?
I'm admitting my ignorance here... Someone please explain to me what the relevance of this is...
The problem is that we don't know what we don't know yet. This discovery will act as a stepping stone for other discoveries that we can't predict; some directly useful in every day life, others not so much. Scientific advancement is all build on the shoulders of those who came before; this discovery lifts us a little bit higher, ready to catch whatever comes next.
Will this be useful for solving real-world problems here and now? Probably not.
Does it help us better understand the universe? Absolutely.
The black hole information paradox is important in physics because a pretty fundamental idea of quantum mechanics is that it shouldn't be possible to destroy information. Burn a book? The complete information about all the molecules in the book are still encoded in the wave function of the system. Annihilate it with anti-matter? The information is now carried by the resulting gamma ray photons. You can make it difficult or impossible to recover the information, but the theory says you can't actually destroy the information itself.
This is why black holes are so interesting... having stuff disappear behind a one-way event horizon is basically the same as information destruction. It was a pretty fundamental paradox.
Now, whether you care about advances in theoretical physics is up to you, but to answer your question "who cares?"... I do. Nerds do. Join us... the universe is a wondrous and beautiful place.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia ...
Millennials ask, "how would you burn Wikipedia?"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole
You rough it up a little, shine a bright light in its face and ask it where it stashed the loot. You could also play good astrophysicist/bad astrophysicist.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
But petrified? What would be the point?
It depends on whether you take it as literal or metaphorical petrification, i.e. just very scared or else turned into stone.
Both are pretty pervy, but in different ways.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't know who's the moron downmoderating my posts days after being posted but I want to acknowledge their work. Keep it up!
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]