this might be a really stupid question but ill throw it out there anyways - ????

Question

ok ive been thinking about this for a while...now im only 15 so im not an expert on anything and dont claim to be, but i love science. one of the most interesting subjects in my opinion are black holes. well you know hawking's information paradox thing right? that everything sucked into a black hole simply dissapears when the black hole dies? and everyone argued that such a theory is stupid because no matter what information can never be lost right? so apparently it goes somewhere according to them.

well i was thinking, if no matter what information can never be lost then what about when people die? like say an old man discovered something about the universe that no one knew before him but died before he got the chance to tell anybody. wouldnt that mean that that information was lost? especially because as humans, death is the end of the road and there is no way for us to know whats on the other side?

cant that mean then that hawking could be right??

i really apologize if this is a stupid question...it probably is but i just couldnt stop thinking about it

it is also probably really confusing to read because its hard putting your thoughts into words. oh well

im gonna add something for the end of the question ----

when we die, if there is something that happens next, there is still no way for us to get that information to the people that are still alive. so essentially for the living - information can be lost.

unless there is a way to communicate with people that are gone

...so basically either the information paradox is true or those creepy old cat ladies that live at the end of your street really do see dead people lol

my head hurts

exactly...like an example used in a show i watched - if a building was completely destroyed, in theory it could still be rebuilt because information is never lost

but human thought is still a form of information i would think.

i was just using the guys death as an example

things like dejavu(sp?) and when loud noise happens right next to 2 people but only one person heard it for some reason. or the fact that no matter what - it is impossible to prove that what your experienced 5 seconds ago actually happened... all of those are examples of lost information (or the possibility of it)

i know about hawking radiation and the fact that black holes evaporate - i was just trying to say "when the hole is gone"...

that one persons really long answer was AMAZING! it was like i was reading one of my pointless little ponder moments (that usually last for hours) right here on yahoo answers lol

i guess there really is no coralation(sp?) between the soul/counscienceness and its experiences - and the physical aspects that make up the earth and everything else in the universe....but i find that hard to believe simply because of the fact that we exist.

im rambling now :) all of yalls' answers are really good though. they help me look at things from all sides and get all of the detials i may have missed before

thankyou to everyone that answered/answers!

oh and kim if you tried to call earlier i wasnt home but im here now so you can call lol :)

Answer 1

If I understand the theory right, "black holes" evaporate because of something known as "Hawking's radiation". Long before Hawkings and even Einstein, Newton proposed the fundamental laws of physics. One of them says nothing is ever created nor destroyed. Destruction and creation are mere illusions. Einstein showed precisely why this was so. He found an exact equivalence between matter and energy. Matter never dissapears - some becomes energy but the energy remains forever. Therefore, even though a black hole might appear to dissapear eventually, it has just become energy which then spreads out into space, increasing the size of the universe.

Everything humans experience is a product of our brains. For example, a particular wavelength of electromagnetic radiation is interpreted by the human brain as the color "red". All humans have brains which are wired the same fundamental way, so everone recognizes the color "red". Of course if humans go extinct, the color "red" will no longer exist. Yes, the wavelength will still exist but the human perception will not exist. What this implies is that the world humans "know" does not actually exist the way we perecieve it. This explains why humans are so easily fooled by illusions. The broader implication is that knowledge does not exist. What we "know" is just a representation of reality and will never be reality itself.

I suppose if one wanted to be really philosophical, then absolute reality could be compared to the speed of light. Einstein's theroy was based on the observation this speed is independant of the speed of the observer. Two drivers traveling 60 mph are stationary in relationship to one another. If both were traveling the speed of light, each would simutaneously see the other driver travel away from them at the speed of light. This seems inconcievable in the "real" human world, but it hints that absolute reality is far beyond human experience.

Absolute reality can be compared to the speed of light for another reason. Another outcome of Einstein's theory is that a moving object creates its own time frame. Someone walking past a person sitting on a bench actually exists in a separate universe. The difference is the passage of time. Moving objects experience the passage of time slower than non-moving objects. However walking speed is so small compared to the speed of light, the difference is far too small to notice.

The anaology is that no two humans experience the world in the same way. We all experience "red" but past this point there is little comparison between people's experiences. This is because humans build knowledge out of their own experiences, and all this is based on associations to other things. Apples are "red" but so were communists during America's "cold war" with Soviet Russia.

I suppose this means the more people know, the faster they are traveling in relation to ignorant people, and the differences in their own perception are thus far different since in terms of the speed of light, they are getting closer and closer to understanding absolute reality. However, a paradox still remains if my anology between knowledge and light speed is really accurate.

Even if one was ever able to experience absolute reality, they would still experience nothing because absolute reality would be moving away from them at the "speed" of absolute reality.

In the final analysis, nothing really matters. What's important is the pleasure we recieve playing around inside our heads. What's outside is not as important as we might "think".

Answer 2

No, it is not stupid question at all. It is a very intelligent question and the answer may lie not in science as of now but in philosophy. First of all, let us ask from where the information entered the old man's mind? If it was created in his mind, that means information can be created and destroyed. If on the other hand, information is like mass and energy that can neither be created nor destroyed, where did it come from and where does it go?

And did Stephen Hawking really say that the information dies along with the black hole? And if so, what happens to all the mass and energy of the black hole? If we apply the conservation principles, that has to reappear some where else, and if a black hole does not obey the conservation laws, then we should reexamine our ideas of energy-mass conservation etc.

I am glad that you are thinking quite advancedly for your age. Best wishes.

Answer 3

Actually the argument against Hawking's theory is not that information can never be lost. It is that physical matter can not be lost.

When a person dies it is possible to lose a great deal of knowledge or information. However their body remains and decomposes and becomes part of the earth so the matter that was their physical body still exists just in different forms.

Answer 4

The way I see it, the answer to your question might be this:
Information lost has nothing to do whether man is capable
of recovering it or not. You used an example of information in a man's memory being lost when he died.
What about information in a live man's memory that has been
forgotten by him? Neither he nor anyone else is capable of recovering it, but this does not mean or prove the info is not there or is now gone from the universe.
Further, as the dead man's brain cells continue to decay, tracking every movement of every cell and every atom of every cell, it could theoretically be reconstructed.
I'm sure this is far beyond man's current capability, but that's
not the point. The point is, it is POSSIBLE to recover it, therefore the info has not disappeared from the universe.
Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Are you really just 15? You have a very creative and prolific mind. Don't ever let life or anyone take that from you. Such could carry you to greatness.

You raise some very interesting questions about information, time, and what really does happen to everything in the universe. My own feeling is that we, and everything else in our universe that we know, is just a part of one big duality. The duality being that the infinitesimal (singularity---quantum effects) gets scaled up into infinite and then scaled back down to the infinitesimal again. Everything that we experience as "now" is a function of the slowing down of light speed (the breaking away of 3D and time from the 11 dimensions), decreasing of mass, increasing of size, and the resulting increasing of velocity and acceleration, gravity. The breaking of symmetry. The scaling up and then scaling down cycle may be one way to account for information lost, it really isn't lost at all. What appears to be lost in this time frame, isn't. It is simply waiting to be discovered again in another time frame or dimension perhaps.

If you look for them and you know what it is that your looking for, you will find patterns in nature (smaller dualities) that models the beginning of the universe and its end (duality), then beginning again.

Answer 6

There exist something in Humans that does not die or is lost. What memory is in the Human Soul and Spirit is not something that is determined in science concerning the Death process.. We Just do not understand the physical transformation that happens after death.
Black holes have nothing to do with the Soul of Humans .

Answer 7

ok well you should know since its me that this wont be a good answer or anything but i get what you are saying and that is a lot for me to even get it lol but yea i have never heard of any of this stuff at all but i do think your question is good i mean i just learned something new yay that dont happen a lot j/k but yea that is a confusing subject sorry but i dont know if you are right or not if i was into the whole science thing i would be more than glad to help you out ....(o mi god btw i have another retarted dream to tell you about so i might end up callin you sometime later if not then ill just tell you later)

Answer 8

I believe you are reading into it a bit too much. When we physicists say "information" can't be lost we aren't talking about information in the sense of knowledge and human thought or the information in Hawking's book.
We are talking about information on the fundamental level, as in what particles exist in a system.

And for the record black holes don't disapear they evaporate by radiating small amounts of energy called Hawking radiation. The mechanisms for this are the quantum mechanical phenomina of pair production and vacuum fluctations.

Answer 9

You're confusing information with knowledge. Information is an thermodynamic concept related to states of matter. Knowlege is a very specific type of information stored in the human brain as memory.

Answer 10

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