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Physicists Theorize Out How To Retrieve Information From a Black Hole (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Black holes earn their name because their gravity is so strong not even light can escape from them. Oddly, though, physicists have come up with a bit of theoretical sleight of hand to retrieve a speck of information that's been dropped into a black hole. The calculation touches on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: how all of the information trapped in a black hole leaks out as the black hole 'evaporates.' Many theorists think that must happen, but they don't know how.

82 comments

  1. Easy by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ask a politician or CEO or salesman. They routinely pull information out of a "black hole".

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
    1. Re:Easy by davester666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's more of a brown hole. Many people refer to it, as well as the politician/ceo/salesman, as an "ass" or "asshole".

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    2. Re: Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well it's more of a brown hole. Many people refer to it, as well as the politician/ceo/salesman, as an "ass" or "asshole".

    3. Re:Easy by MakersDirector · · Score: 0

      LOL

    4. Re:Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That their pants cover.

    5. Re:Easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ha! Ha! Ha!

      Prick.

  2. Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It would more impressive if they could retrieve that lab report I did on my Amiga 20 years ago.

    1. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fear not. The Amiga will rise again. (If only because the NSA doesn't have a backdoor for it yet.)

    2. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      These days you get an automatic redundant backup if you use Facebook or Gmail. Just so long as you mark it private.

    3. Re:Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ha! Ha! Ha!

      Fuckwit.

  3. junk physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why do they expect information to be conserved in the first place? Information loss is common and you don't even need black holes. A simple example is matter-antimatter collision which turns into two photons, so you lose information about the identify of the original particles.

    1. Re:junk physics by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 1

      Why do they expect information to be conserved in the first place? Information loss is common and you don't even need black holes. A simple example is matter-antimatter collision which turns into two photons, so you lose information about the identify of the original particles.

      No information is lost in that scenario.

    2. Re:junk physics by Viol8 · · Score: 0

      Really? Explain how you'd retrieve the velocity, direction and spin state of the original particles from the light created by the collision then.

    3. Re: junk physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And, like many peoe on the internet, you don't know what physical information is, and instead try to use whatever vague definition you have in mind. It is like someone saying you don't perform work by pushing a wall that doesn't move, and someone else complaining that is wrong because the person doing the pushing was being paid to push the wall. Although not correct, you would at least be closer to right if you just replace "information" in the physics context with "entropy."

    4. Re:junk physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      how you'd retrieve the velocity, direction and spin state of the original particles

      This is irrelevant to the physical information content of the system. Physical information is not about how many numbers you can or can't know for every given time. It is basically just the log of the number of possible states the system is in. If you measured everything possible of a given system, it would have no physical information because it would be in a single, specific state.

      Try looking up one of many articles that actually explains what physical information is before making assumptions about the word meaning the same thing as the vague everyday use. Good Such articles typically make use of examples, like variations on Maxwell's demons (Physics Today had a decent article a couple months ago).

      One such example can be quickly and crudely summed up by looking at a box with a particle bouncing around in it, where the particle can be in the left half or right half of the box at any given time. If the box was perfect, and had two opposing walls that could act like ideal pistons, then knowing what side the particle was in would let you compress the opposite side's piston nu-impeded, and then wait for the particle to push back. You can convert information the operator has (a restriction on the number of states) into energy. Similarly, although with a little bit more effort, you can show that getting that information out of the system to the operator, the restriction of the states of the system from two possible to one, costs energy.

      It doesn't matter that the exact values of the original particles can't be measured, because afterwards you are left with two particles with the same total momentum, angular momentum, and energy, and they have numerous states they could be in. In a finite, closed system, you can even potentially have the two photons interact again to recreate the two new particles again. The interaction doesn't restrict the number of accessible states. However, a one way process like, the possibly naive, interpretation of how an event horizon works like a one way surface, does cause the number of possible states in a closed system to decrease.

    5. Re:junk physics by Viol8 · · Score: 0

      Ironic comment coming from someone who can't spell a-r-s-ehole.

    6. Re:junk physics by Viol8 · · Score: 0

      "This is irrelevant to the physical information content of the system."

      So you can't. Well we got there in the end.

      " It is basically just the log of the number of possible states the system is in."

      Thats not even information since it'll be exactly the same for every similar particle or group of particles in a given enviroment. Its like saying "The colour of a black box is black".

    7. Re: junk physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Particles of the same type are indistinguishable, and your complaint sounds like, "But that would mean thermodynamics applies to any similar situation.

      Also, you can bitch and moan that it doesn't match some internal definition of what information is, but that doesn't make you right or insightful. That just makes you dense, and potentially delusional. Your refusal to learn the actual definition is resulting in a bunch of equivocation and nothing more.

    8. Re: junk physics by HiThere · · Score: 2

      It doesn't seem to match the definition of information that programmers use routinely in their work. I'm fairly certain that they is a mathematical identity between the two uses of the word, as they both tie back to Shannon, but the use seems to have developed extremely differently.

      To a programmer every feature that is used to describe an object represents a certain number of bits of information. Clearly it is being asserted that physicists use a very different meaning. It sounds is if it's something like "the log of the number of bits required to fully describe what is knowable about the state". This may actually be closer to Shannon's original meaning, as he was concerned about the amount of information that could be transmitted through a channel of a given bandwidth in a given amount of time, but that's a bit removed from the standard meaning used in computer science, programming, etc.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    9. Re: junk physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The connection between statistical mechanics and information theory was made by von Neumann right when talking with Shannon about his now famous work. If you want to complain the defition is bad, you can start by complaining about their work. Or you can be like Viol8 and equivocate in response to every article about physical theory (it has happened at least several times before) and pretend that refusing to learn about a topic is some form of insight.

    10. Re: junk physics by HiThere · · Score: 2

      I'm not saying the definition is bas, as it clearly isn't. In either field. I'm saying the two fields apparently use the term quite differently. This doesn't make either wrong. And I think that both would agree on the basics, e.g. that a bit is a unit of information.

      P.S.: I tend to think of this as an oversimplification, but it's one we've built all our digital hardware around. The problem is it seems to make any relatively prime chunk of information require an infinite number of bits to express accurately. Try, e.g., to accurately express 1/3 except as a binary number. But practically the higher primes rarely occur, and usually an approximate value is good enough that we don't worry about the finer details. And when we do, there are ways to refer to it...e.g. ratios between two integers. Of course, that doesn't work for the irrational numbers... So I don't think we have an exact theory of information, but only a good approximation. But it's quite a good approximation.

      P.P.S.: Perhaps a good theory of information would easily solve the three body problem. Currently we rely on infinite approximations, that we necessarily cut off at some point. Now chaos theory implies that even knowing the exact solution wouldn't help us, because we couldn't specify the initial conditions exactly enough, so that might not be a real benefit, but it would be a good theoretical benefit. There are a few other cases where the two body case is easy (well, relatively easy) and the three body (or five body, or...) can only be approximated. I have a suspicion that in many of these cases it's because somewhere in the fundamental assumptions there is something where a rule is used that works well for pairs of items, but not for relatively prime groupings. (Of course, here *I'm* assuming that a case with 4 elements can be handled as a pair of pairs, and this isn't always true.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    11. Re: junk physics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Your password can have a lot of bits of data but very little information. You notice where they say your password is weak? The complaint is about entrophy. And if you are cool you can measure that and then say something like "my password has 256 bits of data and 3 bits of entrophy."

    12. Re: junk physics by HiThere · · Score: 1

      While correct, a password usually only has a very little information it is because of the larger embedded context. I.e., if your language is English you find it more common for certain letters to follow other letters, and for letters to follow letters, etc. So the intrinsic information is the number of bits used to express it, but the information in context is the number of bits required to represent it using an optimal compression algorithm using all the contextual information that you know. Both are valid measures of information.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  4. has to be easier than.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    retrieving your tsa-confiscated laptop.

    1. Re:has to be easier than.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ha! Ha! Ha!

      Fucking hell, Slashdot is strong today!!!!!

  5. Simple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Put a bigger black hole right next to it and suck everything out.

  6. too theoretical for now by Champaklal · · Score: 1

    The radiation coming out of black hole will have lots of particles, normalising any information into practical randomness, hence increasing the entropy of universe. it'd take a hell of an effort to find out which photon will carry the information of electron.

    1. Re:too theoretical for now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The whole point of theorising an evaporating black hole is to preserve entropy in the Universe. Your comment lacks understanding of entropy or even basic thermodynamics.

  7. Laws CAPTCHA: mumble by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The laws of nature are the source of the information ultimately. At the heat death of the universe, time stops and space disappears, leaving a big bang that expands into a universe with the same laws of nature producing the same information that was lost in the previous incarnation.

  8. Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    > "Quantum teleportation enables two partners, Alice and Bob, to transfer the delicate quantum state of one particle such as an electron to another. In quantum theory, an electron can spin one way (up), the other way (down), or literally both ways at once. In fact, its state can be described by a point on a globe in which north pole signifies up and the south pole signifies down. Lines of latitude denote different mixtures of up and down, and lines of longitude denote the "phase," or how the up and down parts mesh. However, if Alice tries to measure that state, it will "collapse" one way or the other, up or down, squashing information such as the phase. So she can't measure the state and send the information to Bob, but must transfer it intact."

    Really all she does is map the limits of the detector onto the electron. She takes a measurement, which is the measuring tools representation of the thing being measured. Not the actual thing itself.

    So if I photograph a 3D scene with a camera, the result is a 2D picture. It hasn't made the world 2D, the limits you see in the picture are a result of the limits of the detector. A camera in this case.

    QM says she "sets" it by the act of measuring it, but no such proof exists. And this led Einstein to point out the bogus nature of the claim with "spooky action at a distance". Why would the thing care or know about the limits of the detector being used to detect it?

    So when I use an electronic detector to measure light, that has the issue that electrons are promoted through fixed energy levels, if it can't promote the electron then it cannot be detected. So that detector will appear to see light as flashes (when it can promote the electron), or dark (when it cannot).

    Does the light think "oh.... right I'm in an electronic detector, so I should bunch up to look like particles/photons?" No, of course it doesn't, that's just what light would look like to a detector that can only detect fixed quanta!

    And now we get to extremes like the Delft experiment. Where they filter out any experiment result that isn't "entangled" then put it into a Bells test to prove "entanglement". And claim this as a loophole free proof?? Seriously?

    1. Re:Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So when I use an electronic detector to measure light, that has the issue that electrons are promoted through fixed energy levels, if it can't promote the electron then it cannot be detected.

      You've been told over and over again that this is incorrect, that there are many detection methods not dependent on fixed energy levels, yet you keep posting arguments depending on that false premise, for what seems like years now. Either you're a very boring troll, or you're the one that has a huge issue with assuming reality reflects your point of view, instead of the strawmen you try to point fingers at in your posts.

    2. Re:Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not true. You have no experimental proof of entanglement, let alone a proof of entanglement using NON-electronic free electrons.
      Even the latest delft experiment used electronic detectors.

      Look at the Delft experiment again. This was claimed as (finally) a "loophole free" Bells proof of entanglement:

      http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/21/197224/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions

      They create two electrons, A and B, completely independently, in two different, widely separated labs. They use those electrons to produce a photon each (Ap and Bp), and send those photons to a third lab. The properties of the photons will depend on the properties of the electrons, but the electrons were created independently so the properties of the photons should not be correlated with each other. In fact, if at this stage you test the electrons and photons, you find that A and B and Ap and Bp are not correlated.
      That third lab entangles the photons. Then the two original labs test their electrons. Now they discover that the properties of A and B ARE correlated.

      -----
      Except for one missing step.

      The actual paragraph was on the bottom of column 1, page 2 of the experiment paper: "By conditioning the validity of the Bells test trial, on this event ready signal, failed entanglement distribution events are excluded up front from being used in the Bells Test".

      The actual test at C:
      "The two photons are sent to location C, where they are overlapped on a beam splitter. If the the photons are indistinguishable in all degrees of freedom......used in the event ready signal"

      i.e. if the photon has the property we'd expect of entanglement that we're looking for then we use the experimental result of just those experiments as proof of entanglement.

      Circular reasoning.

      Also without the filtering, the experiment disproved entanglement. The correlation was not there.

    3. Re:Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "there are many detection methods not dependent on fixed energy levels"

      Name ONE.

    4. Re: Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anything that off the shelf detector that has energy resolution and is easy for a undergrad to verify has no discrete levels? E.g detection methods based on the Fermi sea, free electrons, and ionization processes. That covers everything from silicon detectors to photomultiplier tubes to scattering based detectors. And there is more like bolorimetery.

    5. Re:Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you're trying to discuss physics, than respond with "Not true" followed by a complete non sequitur that is unrelated to the post you replied to is a failure to actually discuss anything. And you could have shown some ability to learn, like actually looking up the basic physics that's been pointed out to you before, or fix the mistakes in your ideas that have been pointed out before.

      If you're trying to use a forum for a soap box to announce your thoughts on physics, then replying to someone pointing out you're getting basic physics completely wrong with a "Not true" and no actual response to them will not make anyone think you go the more advanced physics right. Instead of just copy pasting posts hoping that you will get lucky and one modded up from time to time by shear luck, actually engaging people in a forum format will get you better noticed.

      If you're trying to troll people, then you're writing way too much in response to short posts. You're not even addressing their points enough to encourage the original poster to keep arguing, and might as well just reply with "I like turtles." Trolling should be about making the other person put more time and effort into things, not letting other people egg you into wasting a lot of time for no return.

      Regardless of what you're trying to do with your post, you're being completely ineffective.

    6. Re:Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's nothing of substance in your post. I made very specific claims here, that you have not addressed:

      In the above post:
      1. That you have NO proof of entanglement.
      2. That the latest Delft experiment claiming proof was insanely flawed (deluded even). I will even add to my claim:

      > "In the Delft experiment, I said "Also without the filtering, the experiment disproved entanglement. The correlation was not there.""

      They did an experiment, with the 'entanglement' at C, there was no correlation. i.e. proof of no entanglement. The experimenter then filtered the result set with an 'event ready' signal that detected the photons at C were "indistinguishable in all degrees of freedom", i.e. the connection between the two electrons was the experimenters filtering.

      The light doesn't know that the atom its passing forms part of the wall of a double slit experiment, or a photomultiplier, so how can it change its nature to suit something only the experimenter knows?... It's the state of modern physics, that you all passed a faith test to get your PhD and let this shit pass as science.

      3. I asserted that the problem is electronic, Niels Bohr all those years ago, looking at the results from a photomultipler failed to realize that it works by stripping off the outer electron from detector causing (sometimes) a cascade effect which can then be detected.
      In other words, it has a gap below which it cannot detect.
      So it gives exactly the result you would expect, even if light is travelling through both slits.

      If you have no entanglement, then you have no superimposition, and if you have no superimposition then light has BOTH wave and particle properties AT THE SAME TIME. The limited detector simply can measure one or other.

      Now all of your detectors, you seem to think (from your post below) that a Photomultiplier has a zero energy gap. It does not. There is no such thing as a medium composed of pure free electrons. If you have an atom, then you have electrons bound to an outer shell which in turn affect any free electrons available. i.e. an energy gap. To get one more free electron to kick the cascade you have to strip it from an atom.

      Likewise you have no way to measure an energy gap electronically! So this claim below: > "and is easy for a undergrad to verify has no discrete levels" is false.

    7. Re: Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, you did make claims, and responses have been to the very first sentence, "Not true." Why point out every wrong thing when you can't get the first basic things right? You spend a lot of time talking about completely unrelated things, then talk about how some detection methods have a threshold, which doesn't mean they involve discrete energy levels above that threshold. And you insist that free electrons are not an option when scattering is a common diagnostic method for Comtpon scattering, Thomson scattering, inverse bremsstrahlung, which do get covered in undergrad labs.

    8. Re: Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "You spend a lot of time talking about completely unrelated things, then talk about how some detection methods have a threshold, which doesn't mean they involve discrete energy levels above that threshold."

      1. Yes, you always have a threshold, because if zero energy triggered the detector then it would fire all the time. And non-zero energy event would trigger infinite measurements.
      2. This also means that you cannot measure below that threshold. i.e. the cause of the basic error I keep talking about.
      3. And you cannot ever build a detector that goes all the way to zero, because 1.

      Everything I said is simply the unravelling of QM.

      i.e. QM is built on X requires Y requires Z.

      I unravel it as: Z is false (entanglement), ergo Y is false and so is X, and that chain of flaws goes right back to the energy gap issue that cause the false claim of the either-or nature of a photon.

      You make a distinction in your latest point between "discrete energy levels above that threshold" as if the threshold isn't the discrete energy level. As if that fixes anything. If you believe it fixes the problem, please describe how.

      " which do get covered in undergrad labs."
      See 1.

    9. Re: Einstein was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Someone previously explained to you that with energy resolving detectors you can watch the energy approach the threshold when it drops and know the threshold might be a problem. But if are you are seeing all or nothing for energy, then the threshold is not a issue.

  9. But black holes are great by Black+Parrot · · Score: 1

    for data compression.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  10. Reservations re Hawking radiation by Black+Parrot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ignorant amateur here. ISTM that if a virtual pair appears straddling the event horizion, the one that gets away never was inside the black hole to begin with, and thus would not carry away any matter or energy. Isn't the black hole just working as an engine to extract matter/energy from the vacuum near the event horizon? Half of which goes in, making the BH bigger, and half of which escapes to the external universe.

    In the unlikely event that that conception is correct, it would be interesting to think about what happens to the vacuum near the event horizion. Does it get depleted of its vacuum energy, or is it an infinite source? If depleted, does vacuum energy flow in from other nearby vacuum to replenish it?

    Is the vacuum inside a black hole anything like the external vacuum?

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    1. Re: Reservations re Hawking radiation by ninjabus · · Score: 1

      Physics has an answer for how hawking radiation (the emissions caused by half of a virtual partial pair escaping from the event horizon) relates to energy of the local environment. Using thermodynamics, you can calculate the 'temperature' of a black hole, and by comparing this value with the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (3.3 kelvin, if I remember correctly) it predicts if the black hole is losing mass net energy to virtual particles over time. The math works out that larger black holes are 'colder'; they absorb more energy from the CMB than they emit. Most super massive black holes will survive for billions of years until the universe cools down.

    2. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by maugle · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not quite. The virtual pair has a net energy of 0, and therefore isn't really "extracting" anything from the vacuum. If the pair weren't straddling a black hole, they'd recombine and disappear and nothing would happen. However, when one member of the pair is sucked into a black hole while the other particle escapes, the escaping particle must have a greater-than-zero amount of energy. Because of that, and the requirement that the two particles balance each other out, the black hole has necessarily absorbed a negative-energy (not negatively-charged, mind you, actually negative energy) particle, causing the black hole to shrink ever so slightly. Basically, while the particles originally came from vacuum, the energy was taken from the black hole.

      Also, to an external observer this process looks exactly the same as if the black hole itself was slowly emitting particles and shrinking away. And if the black hole is emitting particles, we can use that to determine something about its internal state.

    3. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by burtosis · · Score: 2

      Not quite. The virtual pair has a net energy of 0, and therefore isn't really "extracting" anything from the vacuum. If the pair weren't straddling a black hole, they'd recombine and disappear and nothing would happen. However, when one member of the pair is sucked into a black hole while the other particle escapes, the escaping particle must have a greater-than-zero amount of energy. Because of that, and the requirement that the two particles balance each other out, the black hole has necessarily absorbed a negative-energy (not negatively-charged, mind you, actually negative energy) particle, causing the black hole to shrink ever so slightly. Basically, while the particles originally came from vacuum, the energy was taken from the black hole. Also, to an external observer this process looks exactly the same as if the black hole itself was slowly emitting particles and shrinking away. And if the black hole is emitting particles, we can use that to determine something about its internal state.

      This is correct. The article is specifically addressing a mechanism by which quantum teleportation could release this information across the horizon. Granted to tell exactly what this is you would need to know the instaneous spin to a ludicrous precision, understand how quantum gravity works, understand the exact structure within the black hole, and several other far off concepts. However it is an interesting approach to solving this problem and could further research efforts.

    4. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Half of which goes in, making the BH bigger, and half of which escapes to the external universe.

      It actually makes the BH smaller. The virtual particle at the event horizon has more energy than the same virtual particle inside the blackhole... so the blackhole loses mass when that virtual particle falls in (and the other `virtual' particle appears to be coming out of the horizon). It's weird, but you take a 5 solar mass star, collapse it into a black hole, and it will be much less than 5 solar masses...

    5. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not negative energy.

      The farther away the particle is from the event horizon, the more energy it has---the closer it is to the event horizon, the less energy it has. As the particle falls into the blackhole, the combined system (particle + black hole) actually lose energy, resulting in a drop in mass---which is conveniently carried away by the particle leaving the event horizon area.

      Does that virtual-then-real particle that flies away from the black hole have any information? Potentially... think about how polarization works... perhaps the in-falling virtual particle *cannot* fall into the black hole in some spots due to polarization... (of previously encoded information sitting at the event horizon). The places where it does fall in, it's virtual pair that leaves the black hole is carrying polarization information... e.g. it may not be as ``pure randomness'' as we imagine.

    6. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One thing that bothers me about Hawking radiation. Why is it always the negative particle that gets sucked in?

    7. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As I understand it, that's kind of like asking in a rocket launch, why the exhaust (which stays on Earth) ends up with all the particles that add had decreased gravitational potential energy, while the rocket ends up with all the particles with increased gravitational potential energy. The particle potential energies changed because of how their positions changed with respect to the Earth; the Earth didn't selectively grab all the ones that were going to go negative anyway and let the rest go.

    8. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's weird, but you take a 5 solar mass star, collapse it into a black hole, and it will be much less than 5 solar masses... [citation needed]

      Ummm.... what? Virtual particle pairs and their potential effect on the black hole aren't the same as absorbing a star that didn't just pop out of nothing...

    9. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So the part of this I don't get is, does that negative energy particle then go and annihilate a particle with positive energy, or are there just more overall particles heading to the singularity, some with negative energy? So when the mass of the black hole has completely evaporated, what happened to all of the matter particles that fell in? (or is that what TFA is saying in my mangled understanding, that the matter particles get 'teleported' out?)

    10. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It would be random which particle/anti-particle goes into the black hole. The particle which is flung outwards has a positive kinetic energy, so the particle pulled inwards has a relatively negative kinetic energy. Because there is no bias with regards to matter/anti-matter, the particle clouds going in and out balance out and neutralize each other. This leaves only a net energy emission from the black hole, with no cumulative impact on matter around the black hole.

      This process basically means that a black hole is a stable matter-to-energy converter.

    11. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by Mal-2 · · Score: 1

      It's weird, but you take a 5 solar mass star, collapse it into a black hole, and it will be much less than 5 solar masses...

      First, a 5 solar mass star will likely shed more than enough of it to survive as a neutron star, or possibly even a white dwarf like our Sun will end up. If it were to somehow collapse without blowing off any of its mass, it would just meet the mass of the smallest known stellar mass black hole, and in reality they typically shed the vast majority.

      Second, it's not strange at all that the object that remains has much less mass than the progenitor. Add the mass flung away in the explosion, and the kinetic energy it carries (which is equivalent to mass), and the radiation, and the equation balances. Supernovas are very, very messy -- and this is a very good thing if you like a universe with elements heavier than lithium, which we carbon-based lifeforms generally do.

      --
      How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
    12. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by burtosis · · Score: 2

      It's not negative energy.

      The farther away the particle is from the event horizon, the more energy it has---the closer it is to the event horizon, the less energy it has. As the particle falls into the blackhole, the combined system (particle + black hole) actually lose energy, resulting in a drop in mass---which is conveniently carried away by the particle leaving the event horizon area.

      That sure sounds equivelant to a negative energy or mass to me.

    13. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by maugle · · Score: 2

      Here's another way to think about it: Don't think of the black hole event horizon and singularity as different things. That is probably what's confusing matters. Instead, think of the black hole as a single object, with its event horizon as its "surface". Anything that touches the "surface" disappears and adds its mass/energy to the black hole. However, because of the requirement that the virtual particle pair has a sum energy of 0, and the fact that the escaping particle has a net positive energy, the particle that falls into the black hole must have negative energy, and adding that negative value to the black hole is what causes the black hole to lose energy.

      Alternatively, the particle that falls in could be thought of as leeching energy from the black hole and transferring it to the escaping particle, in a way that would look to an outside observer as though a particle inside the black hole suddenly appeared outside it. That's what the article probably means by particles "teleporting" out.

    14. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by maugle · · Score: 1

      Very messy indeed. All the heavy elements we see around us, it's mind-boggling to think of the energy that must have been required to blast them out from the core of their collapsing star.

    15. Re:Reservations re Hawking radiation by EnsilZah · · Score: 1

      I was wondering about something related to this.
      Would the escaping particles be equal measures of matter and anti-matter?
      And if so, if the black hole was originally made up predominantly of matter, would the radiation process change the ratio of matter and antimatter in the universe (or at least locally)?
      Or is there some force or field that would only let same-charge particles to escape, allowing you to determine what it was originally made of?

  11. Easy, by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    just go to blackhole.com

  12. Homer Already Done Did It! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Late again brainiacs!

  13. Maybe by mbone · · Score: 1

    It's not like there is a lot of experimental evidence here, one way or the other.

    1. Re:Maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your point being?

    2. Re:Maybe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Your point being?

      That you are a Poindexter.

  14. So it can be unfolded backwards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If you reversed time, those photons would head back to the place from the particle collision they started and undo the thing to form the particles.
    So for information to be destroyed, there would be points in time, where you cannot reverse time and undo the thing mathematically.

    So your equation describing the process, would have to work when t=0, t=1, t=2, t=3, t=4 (heading forwards) and yet fail when heading back, e.g. t = 4, t=3, (fail) because between t=2 and t=3 information was destroyed so you cannot reverse time further. (reverse time mathematically in equations not in real life).

    So information is conserved because no such mechanism has ever been found. In terms of common sense that would be the case.

    (Don't confuse the information with the measurement of that information, you might not be able to measure it well enough to reconstruct the original, but that is a different issue, the data is there, its just our measurement limitation.)

    The black hole conjecture was that all that information is trapped behind the event horizon and cannot be retrieve (which would break entanglement, how can the entangled particle, paired to one falling into a black hole, be set by interactions in a black hole if its inside the event horizon when information cannot escape, i.e. entanglement is bogus) .

    Hawkins solution to an equation suggested some radiation could escape a black hole. But if stuff can escape then the "all info trapped behind the event horizon" conjecture is false.... but that seems to have been ignored an they went on and did conjectures assuming both Hawkins is true and Event Horizon limit on info is true and conjectured a bunch of other stuff.

    Here the QM entanglement guys hypothesize ways around the issue to fixup QM.

    It's really conjecture on arbitrary selections of conflicting conjectures, more about budgets than science.

    1. Re:So it can be unfolded backwards by Viol8 · · Score: 0

      Did you pull all that out your backside? Newsflash - you can't go back in time, whether you can mathematically or not is irrelevant. Even mathematically you can just add a modulo function and then its forwards only.

    2. Re:So it can be unfolded backwards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > " you can't go back in time"
      But you can run time backwards in an equation describing physical processes by simply reducing 't'.
      If information was destroyed at some time, then you couldn't go back past the time it was destroyed.

      "Even mathematically you can just add a modulo function and then its forwards only."
      But does that maths represent any real would thing? Being able to contrive an equation, does not make that equation represent something real.

    3. Re:So it can be unfolded backwards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you reversed time, those photons would head back to the place from the particle collision they started and undo the thing to form the particles.

      No, the two photons would have some probability of doing that, but they'd also have some probability of passing through each other. Just because the equations of motion have time-reversal symmetry doesn't mean that the dynamics of particles are time-reversible.

  15. Send it to Guantanamo? by quenda · · Score: 0

    Does that get information, or just data?

  16. "Theorize out"? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    Physicists Theorize Out

    Did they theorize the shit out of this thing?

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  17. Re:What black holes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Attempting to calculate predictions in extreme situations from well tested theories (GR in this case) is a good way to find potential conflicts, either with the theory itself, or with other well tested theories (e.g. QFT and statistical mechanics). Looking for new ways to potentially falsify a theory and/or see if it fails to connect to a diverse set of observations is pretty solid science. Even if you are examining conditions so extreme that they are not physically creatable or observable in the real world, you can still find contradictions that give hints (or more) toward finding the limits of the regimes where the theory is applicable. Those limits may be much more approachable than the thought experiments that suggested where to look.

  18. The Lost Age by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There was literally a Star Trek novel written around this as an idea.

    http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Buried_Age

    It's about Picard's adventures in the 10 years between losing the Stargazer and finally coming aboard the Enterprise.

  19. Well by jandersen · · Score: 1

    Why don't they use water-boarding? It works so well, as we all know.

  20. Theory schmeory by 0dugo0 · · Score: 1

    /dev/null earns its name because the device is so small nothing can be read from it. Oddly, though, physicists have come up with a bit of theoretical sleight of hand to retrieve a speck of information that's been sent to /dev/null. The calculation touches on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: how all of the information written to /dev/null hole leaks out as heat from the CPU and gets 'dispersed' by the heat sink. Many theorists think that happens, but they don't know how to put humpty dumpty together again.

  21. Evaporating black hole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We are living inside a black hole
    It is evaporating
    Happy New Year

  22. Just ask the NSA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They know all about information black holes, seeing as how they are one.

  23. Have you tried: by macbury · · Score: 1

    dd if=/dev/blackhole of=/tmp/data ?

  24. Backwards ideas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thinking about information this way is wrong. Information is not real, it is a derivative of the imagined transportation of matter through space and compression beyond the event horizon. Quantum teleportation is equally a mistake. There is no transport of information. There may be vacuum fluctuations due to the lower density in space around the black hole..

  25. Sounds like Mathematical Masturbation by plopez · · Score: 1

    Call me when there is an experiment to back it up. Otherwise it is just speculation.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  26. Fox news by goombah99 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    fox news emits no information.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  27. Susskinds "Black Hole Wars" gives background by peter303 · · Score: 2

    Of the information loss paradox and various fixes. The "holographic universe" is another fix. That is copy of information inside the BH exists imprinted on the event horizon.

  28. Out there in all of vast existence... by iq145 · · Score: 1

    The Akashic record has to be somewhere!

  29. It's "hypothesize" by tom_neutrino · · Score: 1

    Or "guess". But not "theorize". Ah, the pain.