Wormholes help resolve black hole information paradox

A bridge connecting distant regions of the Universe helps to shed light on the mystery of what happens to information consumed by black holes.

Einstein believes that nothing can escape from a black hole. Black holes should emit radiation when quantum mechanics is considered, according to Stephen Hawking.

This led to a contradiction. Someday, the black hole will be gone, and so will any information about it. The dictum of quantum physics is that information cannot be erased from the Universe.

Physicists think that the information escapes through the radiation. They use the radiation's entropy to measure how much information is lost from the perspective of someone outside the black hole. Don Page calculated in 1993 that if no information is lost, the entropy will grow, but will fall as the black hole disappears.

Page appears to be wrong when physicists combine quantum mechanics with a description of a black hole in general relativity.

Physicists have explored how black holes can be used as escape routes. This is not a real world wormhole, but a way of computing the radiation's entropy.

When Goto and his two colleagues performed a detailed analysis combining both the standard description and a wormhole picture, their result matched Page's prediction, suggesting that physicists are right to suspect that information is preserved even after the black hole's demise.

A new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure has been overlooked in conventional computations.

The basic mechanism of how information is carried away by the radiation is still unknown.

More information: Kanato Goto et al, Replica wormholes for an evaporating 2D black hole, Journal of High Energy Physics (2021). DOI: 10.1007/JHEP04(2021)289 Citation: Wormholes help resolve black hole information paradox (2022, March 8) retrieved 9 March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-03-wormholes-black-hole-paradox.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.