University at Buffalo | State University of New York | 2015 Apr 02
The “information loss paradox” in black holes — a problem that has plagued physics for nearly 40 years — may not exist
Shred a document, and you can piece it back together. Burn a book, and you could theoretically do the same. But send information into a black hole, and it’s lost forever.
An artist’s impression shows the surroundings of a supermassive black hole at the
heart of the active galaxy NGC 3783 in the southern constellation of Centaurus.
A new study finds that information is not lost once it has entered a black hole.
(Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
That’s what some physicists have argued for years: That black holes are the ultimate vaults, entities that suck in information and then evaporate without leaving behind any clues as to what they once contained.
But new research shows that this perspective may not be correct. ...
The paper outlines how interactions between particles emitted by a black hole can reveal information about what lies within, such as characteristics of the object that formed the black hole to begin with, and characteristics of the matter and energy drawn inside. ...
The research marks a significant step toward solving the “information loss paradox,” a problem that has plagued physics for almost 40 years, since Stephen Hawking first proposed that black holes could radiate energy and evaporate over time. This posed a huge problem for the field of physics because it meant that information inside a black hole could be permanently lost when the black hole disappeared — a violation of quantum mechanics, which states that information must be conserved. ...
Radiation from a Collapsing Object is Manifestly Unitary - Anshul Saini, Dejan Stojkovic
- Physical Review Letters 114 111301 (17 Mar 2015) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.111301
arXiv.org > gr-qc > arXiv:1503.01487 > 04 Mar 2015 (v1), 25 Mar 2015 (v2)