What happens to information in a black hole?

Question

Wired Magazine recently asked some "Big Questions" in the cover story. This is one of them.

Details:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions.html?pg=3#hole

Answer 1

The truth is nobody currently knows what happens to information once it is lost to a black hole. However, there are theoritical indications (aka mathematical proofs) that indicate information is NOT lost or destroyed, but does slowly leak out of the black hole.

The only way for us to fully understand what happens to matter/energy/information around and within a blackhole is for us to develop a complete theory of quantum gravity, or else no matter what anybody says here on Yahoo Answer or publishes in scientific journals, it's all guesswork.

There are currently only two candidates of quantum gravity theory: Superstring and LGQ (Loop Quantum Gravity). However, both are partial theories and both have inconsistencies that require resolution before we can answer the information loss issue.

What physicists currently speculates is that the Universe is really made of nothing but information, which underlies the existence of spacetime itself, and it has been shown that all the information required to describe our 3-dimensional world can be encapsulated in 2-dimensions. This is called the "Holographic Principle", meaning that the physics describing a 3-d world can be describe equivalently for a 2-d world.

So the question is....does the Universe even really exist??? Or are we just some computer simulation?

Answer 2

Well a principle assertion of the article - that the laws of physics say information cannot be destroyed - is plain wrong. As a result most of what the article says is utterly misleading.

In fact the laws of physics pretty much say quite the reverse - that information can be preserved or destroyed but never created.

Of course, it all depends what you mean by information, but the usual measure of information is organisation, and the physical measure of organisation of a system is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy only ever increases, and this has never been found to be wrong.

The issue with black holes is more subtle that the article makes out. General relativity says you should not be able to get information out of a singularity - i.e. a black hole. So if something falls into a black hole you should not be able to derive any further information about it - to do so would, in effect, send the entropy of the black hole in the wrong direction.

Now consider a quantum entagled pair of particles - that is, two particles in a situation where if one is in one state, the other must be in another state by the law of quantum mechanics. An example is two lowest energy state electron, one spin up and the other spin down. Let one of them fall into a black hole. Now we do not know which one, so this is fine. Now measure the electron outside the black hole - voila, we now know the state of the one in the black hole.

But this should not be possible.

And here is Hawkins dilemma.

Answer 3

Since information needs some signal to come out and since nothing including light can come out in the classical model of a black hole, information cannot come out. But recent research suggests that some information leaks out of a black hole (that means it is a little grey!). It is still frontier research and may be needs some more time to get confirmed.

Answer 4

There is a new theory that suggests that the information as well as things such as light and debris actually just gets distorted or smeared. That the object is never truly destroyed. Stephen hawking clung to the original Black hole theory for 30 years and then recently revised it.

Answer 5

Depends on the size of the black hole. Recent theory's have suggested that a super massive black hole can leave items above the limit for crushing them.
The limit is a German word meaning black children I believe. Forgive me for this term has been misplaced in my mind.
B

Answer 6

Doesn't information rise up a curve to singularity? I remember something about a ship to an outside observer would slow perpetually as it approached the black hole.

But then I also read somewhere about how Hawkin rethought his ideas on black holes because some information can be observed on them. Sounds more like philosophy than astrophysics to me.

Answer 7

you will possibly get compressed till you have been a factor with mass and 0 quantity. might you nonetheless stay? uncertain on that... A black hollow and a wormhole are thoroughly diverse. so which you not disappear into yet another galaxy in case you have been sucked right into a BLACK hollow.

Answer 8

while it is being "sucked up", it is broken down into strings of particles. So a person would look like a very very long string of dna. Then once it goes in, we dont know for sure, there are many theories on this

Answer 9

my guess is one of three possabilitys it is compresed with the singularity, released as radiation or just erased and depending on what type of information it is it may be a combination of all three.

Answer 10

...what information...? is someone "talking" out there...? I've seen a few black holes....but we arn't going to talk about them here.....