What happens to the information after it has passed by a black hole? The math has been difficult to say the least, and there have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help.
An international team of physicists has found a way to understand how a collapsing black hole can avoid breaking the fundamental laws of quantum physics.
The work suggests that there are things we are missing in the quest to resolve general relativity with quantum mechanics.
Physicist Kanato Goto of Cornell University and RIKEN in Japan says that they discovered a new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure that had been overlooked in conventional computations.
This new geometry gives a completely different result.
There are unresolved tensions between Einstein's theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The event horizon of a black hole is a point of no return. Everything that passes beyond that critical point is sucked into the black hole's gravity well, and no speed in the Universe, not even that of light in a vacuum, is enough for escape velocity. That's it, it's gone. Kaput. Irretrievable.
In the 70s, Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes could emit radiation if quantum mechanics is taken into account.
This occurs as a result of the black hole interfering with the surrounding particles, making them wave-like, and it gets hotter as the black hole gets smaller.
The glow should make a black hole disappear.
Goto explains that this is called black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks.
It would appear that whatever entered into the black hole is gone for good since the glow doesn't look like what happened in the first place. Information cannot simply disappear from the Universe according to quantum mechanics. Physicists have explored the possibility that the information is hidden in the radiation.
Goto and his team wanted to explore the idea by computing the Hawking radiation's entropy. It can be used to diagnose information loss in Hawking radiation.
According to a 1993 paper by physicist Don Page, if disorder reverses and entropy drops down to zero as a black hole disappears, the paradoxes of missing information should be avoided. There is no quantum mechanics that would allow this reversal to happen.
There is a mathematical replica of one under very specific models of the Universe. A bridge across a ravine is like a connection between two regions of a curved sheet of spacetime.
Goto says that thinking of it this way in conjunction with black holes gives us a different way of calculating the entropy of Hawking radiation.
He explains that a wormhole connects the inside of the black hole to the outside.
The results of the team's calculations matched the Page curve. This suggests that information may not be lost forever after all.
There are still some questions that need to be answered. We cannot consider the black hole information paradoxes resolved until these are answered.
The basic mechanism of how information is carried away by the radiation is not known.
The research has been published.
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