Black Hole Information Loss Paradox Solution Proposed 252
Anuborn Satirak writes to tell us that Physicists from Case Western Reserve University claim to have cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has puzzled physicists for the past 40 years. "The physicists are quick to assure astronomers and astrophysicists that what is observed in gravity pulling masses together still holds true, but what is controversial about the new finding is that 'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and that the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,' said Krauss, director of Case's Center for Education and Research in Cosmology."
1/0 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/British_computer_scie
Solved tihs alrelady (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
-- http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/ [cam.ac.uk]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Offtopic tho.
And I've heard this before.
obviously (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Link to paper (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link to paper (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
A black hole is not a thing that exists in time and space, it's an event or process that is a warping the space-time fabric. It's a fine point, but it bears repeating -- a black hole is not a 'thing' that warps time-space, it *is* a warping of time-space. An object actually moving to the center of the black hole takes an infinitely long time to get there, so when it actually does get there, it happens to arrive right at the end of the universe.
So it kind of is like the black hole is perpetually in creation phase, but the matter doesn't disappear until the end of the universe. I read a post a few years back that the word for black hole in Russian is 'Collapsar'. Like a Pulsar always 'pulses', matter is always ( literally *always*, or, from now until the end of time ) collapsing in a Collapsar.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
While I understand your intent in that sentence, your wording is a bit misleading. If it arrives right at the end of the universe, then it has done so after a finite and terminating length of time (even if arbitrarily as long as the universe itself). This means that the item would in fact reach the mass point of the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's got nothing to do with Slashdot. What's 'funny' is as relative as the universe... If I said some of the thing I find funny, someone may even shoot me... So much for freedom of speech, right?
I'm confused (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What is new is that this new theory predicts that the person WATCHING would also never see the event horizon. How this works is completely unclear from the article. They seem to be saying that new black holes cannot form.
However, simple physics predicts that if you get enough mass in a small-enough area, the escape velocity exc
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
This article is identical to what we covered... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see how this is new or radical, except for the general population, who seem to think that for every "black hole" there is a corresponding "white hole", or that when you "fall into a black hole", you somehow end up somewhere else.
You should read Feynman's lecture series; he has one from the 50's that debunks the idea of a "graviton" or a particulate carrier for gravity because of the need for it to have mas
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I read the article, and I think this part of it is b.s. All black holes existed since the beginning...uh??? What about, you know, space, and time, and all that? I seriously doubt that black holes were pre-fabbed like houses.
>Somewhere there is a contradiction. Can somebody explain?
I think they just took it one step too far.
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, they emphasize in their paper that they are considering their problem from the point of view of an external observer, rather than the point of view of an observer falling into the black hole. They write: They also contrast their results with previously accepted analysis of black hole formation: So, in essence, they are presenting findings that suggest that even quantum effects are taken into account, the collapse takes an infinite amount of time. This is signficant because it means that while the collapsing mass can appear to get closer and closer to being a singularity, it can never really achieve this final state to an external observer. How this relates to information loss is then described: So, in essence, the collapse of the black hole takes an infinite amount of time, during which time the black hole will evaporate via Hawking radiation [wikipedia.org]. So objects falling into a black hole will never actually be swallowed up into the black hole (though they will get arbitrarily close and arbitrarily crushed!). Since the collapse is never really complete, information about the objects is never entirely lost. The emitted radiation will thus contain 'information' about the infalling objects. This in some way can be seen to resolve the seeming information paradox, whereby black holes were seemingly able to 'swallow up' information and completely destroy it (whereas no other process in the universe appeared able to do so).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If they do make a black hole in the Large Hadron Collider, what makes them think that the CERN campus won't fall in?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if the black hole was big enough to suck in the CERN campus with its gravity, the matter from which it was formed would have the same effect.
Re: (Score:2)
All you are really saying is that if they make a black hole the CERN campus won't get sucked in immediately. Over time, as the black hole absorbs more and more matter from the air around it then eventually it will have enough mass to suck in the CERN campus.
That is unless it 'evaporates' first. It's only a matter of time until we do something stupid that really does cause a planet-wide chain reaction (or locks up the Earth Simulator we are running in...).
Yes, you're right, we have started it already - Global Warming. Anyway, the black hole at CERN will be like 1/100 the size of an atomic nucleus, how is is supposed to eat up one? Even better, it is going to evaporate almost instantaneously, because the smaller they are, the faster they disappear due to Hawking radiation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Interesting)
To my understanding, the suggestion is that the collapsing matter will never create a true event horizon (a boundary from which nothing can ever escape). However this doesn't prevent the matter from collapsing to an arbitrarily high density and creating an increasingly large escape velocity. Think of a dense chunk of matter (but not infinitely dense). It will warp spacetime around it significantly, and it will bend the direction of light rays significantly. If a ray of light strays too close to the center of this quasi-singularity, it will get caught in a tight orbit. Now, the orbit won't be truly stable, and the light ray will, after some rotations around the gravity well, finally escape.
The denser the quasi-singularity is, the more rays will get trapped (temporarily) in these orbits, and the longer they will stay trapped. At a certain point, when light is being trapped for 10E80 year, the object could very sensibly be called a black hole. For all intents and purposes, infalling light does not escape. In principle, in a very long time the light may escape. Or, according to this new theory, the black hole may evaporate before actually forming (although this, too, will take a long time). But the massive curvature of spacetime will still lead to all the light-trapping and time-dilating effects normally predicted for black holes. This theory is merely suggesting that the containment is not absolute. Eventually, the stuff will escape. (Although for material objects, they will have been crushed and distorted beyond recognition. But at least in principle, the 'information' about them wasn't lost.)
Under the new theory, objects of near-infinite density still form, and still (in any practical sense) trap all incoming matter. However the question comes down to whether the singularity at the center is a true singularity with a true event horizon, or a perpetually-collapsing mass that has not quite yet reached the point of being a true black hole.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're feeling up to a challenge: how does matter get "evaporated" when EMR can't escape, why must information be preserved, and does this mean that after evaporating enough matter black holes would burst back out an
Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)
That's a rather zen question, actually. In some ways it amounts to asking "What's the difference between the matter that forms the black hole, and the matter that is falling into it?" Conventionally, the answer would be: all the matter inside the event horizon is part of the black hole, and everything outside the event horizon is falling into it (or, rather, is being gravitationally attracted towards it, and may or may not actually fall).
If this new bit of theory is correct, then the answer actually becomes harder, because the event horizon never forms, so you can't really say that some matter is inside vs. outside. Of course there is probably a sensible way to define a "pseudo-horizon" based upon a threshold where the probability of light escaping sharply drops towards 0.
I guess another way of thinking about it would be to say that this hypothetical matter that is "at the center of where the black hole is forming" would inevitably be included into the collapsing mass and would thus, itself, become part of the black hole.
It's true that EMR that enters the event horizon cannot escape. The evaporation process, called Hawking radiation [wikipedia.org], is a quantum effect that has no conventional analogue. Basically, in quantum mechanics (or rather quantum field theory), it is predicted that "virtual particles" randomly appear and disappear all the time. These virtual particles actually carry the force of things like the electric fields, magnetic fields, gravitational fields, etc. (they also avoid 'action at a distance' problems...). So in the vacuum, you will get random particle-antiparticle pairs appearing at random, and annihilating each other a moment later (these constant fluctuations are very important in modern theories, actually). If you imagine one of these random fluctuations occurring right beside an event horizon, you can imagine that one of the two particles gets sucked into the event horizon, but the other one escapes and sails off into the universe. The particle entering the black hole will actually reduce its mass (not increase it, as one would normally expect... though the proof of this requires digging into the math quite a bit), and the particle that escapes thereby carries away some of the mass of the black hole. Thus, over time, the blackhole is basically emitting radiation and slowly 'evaporating.'
Now, I know this idea of "virtual particles" randomly appearing and disappearing sounds totally bizarre. In fact it sounds like pseudo-science or an overcomlicated story that particle physicists are weaving. However these effects do have experimental backing (e.g. Casimir forces [wikipedia.org]).
It turns out the rate of evaporation increases as you decrease in size. So really "micro black holes" (it is predicted that they will be created in upcoming particle accelerators) will evaporate very quickly. Big black holes will evaporate slowly at first, but then faster and faster as they shrink, until they get very small and release the last of their energy, in some sort of burst, yes. However a fundamental, unanswered, question is whether the radiation being emitted by the black hole contains 'information' about the states of things that went into the black hole. No one knows for sure. The conventional answer was that any information that goes into a black hole is lost forever.
However to many scientists, this answer was unsatisfactory.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But a black hole is time-asymmetric. In one direction, information is irrevocably lost, whereas if you run the equations backwards, information is spontaneously created... which makes no sense (mathematically) because you don't know what information to put in there!
I'm curious: why not just put random information in there? There's effectively random information coming out of the black hole as it 'evaporates' over forward time, so what's wrong with having random particles 'fall out of' a black hole (so to speak) when you play the model backwards?
I seem to recall from somewhere that, quantum mechanically speaking, the past is just as indeterminate as the future, as any number of slightly different recent pasts could have lead to a present indistinguishable from this on
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. That would solve the short-term mathematical problem, but not the deeper mismatch of the theories. Also, whether or not Hawking radiation is truly random, or whether it contains hidden information (in a non-trivially
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
He's entered the black hole, and information has been lost to him. I can get my head around thinking that information is relative, but now the laws of the universe hold for some people but not others?
OTOH, if I was falling into a black hole, entropy's the least of my worries.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Work in progress... (Score:2)
What is the problem with a small nucleus? Well, if you believed in point charges then you would have light electrons orbiting a heavy nucleus like a small solar system. With a simple hydrogen atom, you would have a proton
Re: (Score:2)
However the 2d map doesnt show the 3d reality of the ground and there is actually a mountain between you and the picnic spot. So instead of it taking you 20 mins to walk there it actually takes you over an hour. Despite the fact that you're walking at a leisurly 3km/hour a lot of that effort is being translated into a vertical displacement and your actual
I should probably RTFM, but... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Experiment (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.
See? no need for black holes.
Re: (Score:2)
from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon
Nothing like an experiment to verify theories. And indeed, a quick trip to the DMV or the social security office confirms that it does seem to take an infinite amount of time for any event to occur, and that the clock seems to stop locally.
See? no need for black holes.
Yeah, but time, from the perspective of outside said offices, seems to speed up such that right after leaving the DMV it's time to go back again. This applies for jury duty, as well. I feel a GUT coming on...
Hawking's solution (Score:5, Informative)
Basically what Hawking said (in a late essay entry in a science conference) was that Black Holes do 'digest' information and therefore you have information loss, however (and this is where his proposal was a bit controversial) Hawking suggested that the conglomeration of parallel universes will have a particular Black Hole present in one, and the same Black Hole missing in another, therefore the TOTAL information for ALL Universes, is retained.
Here's a link to Hawking's Black Hole Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_informati
And from the wiki article, here's the line I'm mentioning in my post:
"...On October 28, 2006, The Discovery Channel aired a show called "The Hawking Paradox". The show explained Hawking's conclusion that one must look at the universe as a whole, and that information lost in black holes is saved in parallel universes where no black holes exist."
It seems that this new solution is completely disregarding Hawking's proposal and replacing it with a new, stretched solution.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hawking's solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Ohh boy... isnt that like saying the world was flat back in the middle ages? Yet some people the world believe the world is round, sounds good on paper, but really since we cant detect that it its probabley just a belief anyway..
Re: (Score:2)
No, because the information in other universes is undetectable in principle, whereas determining the geometry of Earth is, in principle and reality, possible.
Undetectable? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Only children (and aetheists apparently) think of God as a big guy in the clouds or even as a separate entity from the Universe... and only because they have limited ability to think in ab
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Hawking's solution (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(obligitory amazon link -> Einstein: His Life and Universe [amazon.com] )
This new theory fits easily.
CD7 tracks 6 and 7 talk about information transforming based on frame of refere4nce but still staying the same.
CD9 track 2 starts to bring up descriptions of the universe and time and defines a black hole and describes time dialation. the author makes a callout to the 60s and Hawking.
CD9 track 3 goes into some detail of how Einsteins relativ
Re: (Score:2)
They're doing it wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Zeno of Elea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Eliminating Black Holes Eliminates Paradox (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Like I said in this other post [slashdot.org], a black hole is not a thing that warps ti
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds to me like you understand the difference between time and speed better than most. The universe understands speed, there is a limit. Time is a reduction of that.
Anything moving at perfect speed has, by definition, infinite time to complete its task. Observers at lower speeds get to watch and die in the meantime.
Re: (Score:2)
Your language is somewhat crude grasshopper.
I agree .
Black holes can exist. What can't exist, according to this new theory, is a singularity with an event horizon.
In common parlance, I think people are talking about the singularity when they say 'black hole'. They don't mean the matter swirling around it.
I mean, what is a black hole without a singularity? Wouldn't it missing the 'black hole' part?
From present knowledge there is no 'end to the universe' only a heat death, but time will still go on.
A side point, but doesn't time stop if you read the speed of light?
Quote from article (Score:2)
What an understatement.
Rename 'Black holes' to 'Wholes' (Score:3, Funny)
Prrof this can't be valid (Score:2)
No... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
By 'see' I don't mean visibly. I mean that anything that takes an infinite amount of time to form will therefore never completely form, so therefore shouldn't ever exist in its entirety, yet black holes have been proven to have complete event horizons.
No... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
new scientist article (Score:4, Informative)
http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-
It quotes 't Hooft as claiming that "The process he describes can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as he is suggesting." So I am skeptical.
I see ... (Score:2, Funny)
1. They aren't dupes and they don't exist because they never form
2. they are dupes but come from another universe where they have been deleted and saved here....
Microscopic black holes (Score:2)
I found this idea about microscopic black holes [universetoday.com] much more interesting. They are talking about the idea that these things could be rattling around inside the sun, or inside Jupiter and causing it to heat up, or even inside the earth. It was also suggested that the new Large Hadron Collider might be capable of creating microscopic black holes through the collision of particles at relativistic velocities.
I once read a scifi story decades ago about this tiny black hole that revolved around a planet close to th
Well DUH! (Score:2)
That's so obvious I've been wondering for years why anyone thought there was a paradox.
Old knowledge (Score:2)
I don't know as much about relativity as I would like to, but hasn't this been known since forever?
Why is there a paradox in black holes? (Score:2)
Poul Anderson used this in a short story in 1968 (Score:2)
This story was published in 1968.
Sad (Score:2)
Slashbots these days. Boring, boring, boring. No hot grits, no Natalie Portman naked and petrified, no goatse links.
Oh, for the halcyon days of OGG THE OPEN SOURCE CAVEMAN!
Re: (Score:2)
black holes have no hair... (Score:4, Informative)
No. Black holes aren't lopsided [wikipedia.org]
Re:Divide by zero error (Score:4, Funny)
Over a nice meal.
Re: (Score:2)
Any time we try to look at such things at the microscopic level. the history of which random numbers were displayed is recorded somewhere (often many places), for instance in the motional states of the ato
Re: (Score:2)
So while saying "If I drop this apple it will fall" is a D'uh, WHy and how are for more complex.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet another assumed interpretation of QM (Score:5, Interesting)
QM lies at the physical border of observable physics. At the QM boundary, concepts we take for granted such as electrons and the speed of light have different meaning. Humanity has nothing to do with it. At a small scale, the behavior of matter changes.
Here's an analogy:
Let's say Newtonian (ordinary) physics involves sitting on the side of the road and tracking how fast people are driving in their cars. From this perspective, you can get a pretty good idea where the cars are going. But there's still some randomness to it, if some driver changes their mind.
In this analogy, QM would be like sitting inside each car tracking who is having what conversation, who is on their cellphone, whether their hands are on the gearshift or on their girlfriend's boob, etc. It's a whole other level that you can't see from the side of the road.
If you could be inside each car, then you would know. But you can't. That's QM, the individual decision-making of each driver on the road.
Each driver==each electron. Whether you choose to track electrons with free will or with robotics, it's still too small and random to keep track of all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Each driver==each electron. Whether you choose to track electrons with free will or with robotics, it's still too small and random to keep track of all the time.
Cool! A car analogy! I think that when you track electrons with free will or with robotics, they're more like cars with sirens on them. You know, cops. Like you see on TV late nights, where they have hot chicks run DNA tests.
Mmmmmm... Hot chicks with big breasts....
Sorry, was I saying something?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, thank you.
However,
If you can cross the distance of an atom, via strong/weak forces, as quickly as you can cross that distance via the speed of light, then you have a new physics.
Entirely predictable, of course. It's just a whole other realm where forces converge. The short distances make speed a different issue.
Re: (Score:2)
It's so five years ago. Well, to be accurate, more like seven.
Be careful of assumptions yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
You would like the universe to be like our models, of mathematics, that we created in order to understand and predict this universe. This mathematics is *within* the universe, so how this ever can be capable of holding all the parameters / the absolute truth, now *that* is irrational!
So the whole premise, although very tempting, is just impossible. The universe does not exist out of mathematics, mathematics exists because of this universe! To
Re: (Score:2)
'from an external viewer's point it takes an infinite amount of time to form an event horizon and, from that external perspective, the clock for the objects falling into the black hole appears to slow down to zero,'
so time will slow down in my frame of reference, and so it will seem that I will never reach the ... event horizon
Not quite, time slows down for you in my frame of reference, far from the hole. You always see yourself going through time at the same rate.
But, if I'm ou