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 closedTag: The theory of everything
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…
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In last week’s post on entropy, I blithely referred to black holes as spontaneously increasing in entropy. This may seem counterintuitive (as much as anybody can have “intuition” about black holes). If we view the increase in entropy as a system moving from order to disorder, how would a singularity become more disordered? How could the contents of a black hole spread out in a more disordered manner if they are supposed to take up an infinitely small amount of space? If we use the other definition of entropy, the dispersal of energy, then that would imply that a black…
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