Last Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez, and Reinhard Genzel. Penrose was awarded half of the prize for his foundational theoretical work proving the existence of black holes. The other half of the prize was shared between Ghez and Genzel for their experimental measurements that found the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is the first to be awarded for research involving black holes. As we’ve seen in the past few weeks, black holes have massive implications throughout theoretical physics.…
Comments closedTag: General Relativity
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing the potentially destructive implications of Hawking radiation, the mechanism by which black holes slowly decay. One of the most pressing implications is the information paradox. A core tenet of quantum physics, the conservation of quantum information, demands that quantum information is not ever destroyed or created. But Hawking radiation seems to defy this rule. Information that enters a black hole becomes irretrievable, but it’s not destroyed. But, when a black hole evaporates into random thermal radiation, what happens to that information? One of the most popular theories involves all the information inside…
Comments closed
From my last two blog posts on Hawking radiation and the conservation of quantum information, it’s clear that we have a major problem on our hands—the information paradox. We know that black holes decay over unimaginable timescales, seemingly erasing quantum information in the process. But we also know that quantum information has to be conserved. Theoretically, at least, we have to be able to trace particles back through their quantum histories. If black holes were entirely stable, then we could consider this condition met. While the information in a black hole would be inaccessible, it wouldn’t be destroyed. But if…
Comments closed