What is Information Paradox?

Question

Thx@bustersmycat.

Answer 1

One of the most fundamental tenets of physics and science is causality. The idea is that if you could know everything about a certain piece of matter, you could reconstruct its entire history. Things are the way they are because of a specific chain of events that have occurred. The information paradox arose from work that Stephen Hawking did on black holes.

Hawking discovered that black holes eventually evaporate, due to something that we call Hawking radiation. Black holes slowly radiate a kind of energy that will eventually (over a massive time scale, many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe) cause them to evaporate and disappear. The problem was that this energy was uniform and did not carry with it any information about the matter that the black hole ate. Essentially, the black hole became an information destroyer, and this freaked out many astrophysicists. If one admitted that information could be destroyed in this fashion, it couldnt' be quarantined and said only to occur in black holes, you have to acknowledge the possibility that it can occur in other contexts, and if this was the case, science as we know it would be screwed. If causality itself was not a hard and fast rule for the universe, then the universe would be in trouble. Our past may not actually exist like we remember it. The results from scientific experiments couldn't be trusted because cause and effect would become decoupled. This is the information paradox.

One supposed resolution to this problem is that things that enter a black hole are not destroyed... everything is still there as it was, and can be retrieved if you can figure out how to get in and out with it. Hawking himself came up with a kind of answer to the problem involving multiple universes, but this theory isn't well accepted right now. It's a tough topic and it's cutting edge stuff as far as astrophysics goes.

Answer 2

I liked both answers; the second one was most informative.

I too had to look this one up. Hawking offered the explanation that the information that passes the event horizon is not lost but transported to an alternate Universe with no black holes.

I believe this alternative Universe theory comes from M Theory with branes, (membranes), and 10 or 11 dimensions.
It's super string theory a possible 'theory of everything' sought after by all physicists.

Answer 3

The black hole information paradox results from the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It suggests that physical information could "disappear" in a black hole. It is a contentious subject since it violates a commonly assumed tenet of science—that information cannot be destroyed

Answer 4

I didn't know and got curious so I looked it up (I cheated so this answer is not really from my head). To paraphrase, it is impossible to see inside a black hole, so information concerning the state of matter and energy is lost from the universe when it enters the black hole. This concept is at odds with Quantum Mechanics, which states that this information cannot be lost because of the reversibility postulate. Not sure if that helps you or not.

I like my original thought on reading your question: the more you know, the more you know you don't know. That is not the correct answer of course, but I like it as an answer anyway.

Answer 5

Thats interesting, so to live in a perfect universe with no famous people that would be mentioned in an encyclopedia, you just bungee jump off of a spacecraft with your friends and family, each holding only a copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica for protection, with a biography of each of you in it...... the start of a new religion, ****!