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."
Link to paper (Score:5, Informative)
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: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).
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.
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Informative)
No... (Score:5, Informative)
black holes have no hair... (Score:4, Informative)
No. Black holes aren't lopsided [wikipedia.org]
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.
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 mass.
-- Terry
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:Sorry, Gene Roddenberry (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Rotating black hole (Score:2, Informative)
Likewise, they are dealing only with domain walls of zero thickness.
However, this does adequately describe any given spherical domain wall of uniform density; nonspherical domain walls can be treated as a set of spherical domain walls with nonuniform density. However, I'm not sure if the tensor describing a nonuniformly dense domain wall is even solvable with current techniques or not; a lenticular tensor may be easier, but as this is at the very grey edge of my math skills, I haven't the foggiest idea if that is true for the general treatment of the Wheeler-de Witt equation.
Reading the preprint is rather informative; while the math is a little beyond my grasp, the concepts are not, and their 'conclusions' are very enlightening, as they detail problems in their analysis that suggest possible issues.
First, they deal with the lack of rigorous treatment of unspecific backreaction, and state that until such treament is available the final fate of the collapsing object is indeterminate.
Second, they deal with their assumptions and the possible changes in their results due to their assumptions (the zero thickness domain wall, the domain wall being spherical and of uniform density, their truncation of superspace to minisuperspace, the lack of allowance for possible third quantization due to annihilation and creation of domain walls, their Langrangian not breaking down near the Shwarzschild horizon, etc, all of which are in the preprint).
It is quite a fascinating read.