6/7/2016 Stephen Hawking’s finally published a solution to the black hole information paradox ­ ScienceAlert

Stephen Hawking’s 쳷蝘nally published a solution to

the black hole information paradox
What??
FIONA MACDONALD 7 JUN 2016

Stephen Hawking made headlines back in January when he told the world he'd
found a possible solution to his black hole information paradox - or in other
words, he'd come up with a potential explanation for how black holes can
simultaneously erase information and retain it. 

Back then, he put his paper up on pre-print site arXiv.org, so the rest of the
physics community could poke holes in it, and now, almost six months later, the
research has 쳷蝘nally been published in a peer-reviewed journal - and it suggests
that we might actually be getting closer to 쳷蝘guring out this problem once and for
all.

To understand why this is such a big deal, and what the black hole information
paradox really is, we need to go back to where it all started.

Our original understanding of black holes, according to Einstein's generally

theory of relativity, is that everything that crosses the event horizon - the
boundary of a black hole - is lost forever. Even light can't escape its clutches,
which is why black holes are called black holes (and also why it's impossible for
us to actually see one).

But then in the 1970s, Hawking proposed that radiation actually can escape
from a black hole, because of the laws of quantum mechanics. Put very simply,
he suggested that when a black hole swallows one half of a particle-antiparticle
pair, the other particle radiates away into space, stealing a little energy from the
black hole as it leaves.

Because of this, eventually, black holes can disappear, and the only remaining
trace would be the electromagnetic radiation they emitted - which is known as
'Hawking radiation'. 

The problem is that, according to Hawking's best calculations, that radiation

would contain no useful information about what the black hole ate - the
information swallowed up would have been lost forever. And that doesn't gel
with our understanding of modern physics, which states that it's always possible
to reverse time. In theory, at least, processes in the Universe will look the same

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if they're running forwards or backwards.

As Dennis Overbye explains over at The New York Times: 

"The Universe, like a kind of supercomputer, is supposed to be able to keep

track of whether one car was a green pickup truck and the other was a red
Porsche, or whether one was made of matter and the other antimatter. These
things may be destroyed, but their 'information' - their essential physical
attributes - should live forever."

Hence the paradox. And it's actually a big deal not just for astrophysicists,
because if the rules of quantum mechanics don't hold up for black holes, then
what's to say they apply to the rest of us?

But Hawking thinks he 쳷蝘nally has a solution to the problem - black holes might
actually have a halo of 'soft hair' surrounding them, which are capable of storing
information.

That 'hair' isn't actually hair - as you might have already assumed - but is actually
low-energy quantum excitations that carry with them a signature pattern of
everything that's been swallowed up by the black hole, long after it evaporates.

"That pattern, like the pixels on your iPhone or the wavy grooves in a vinyl
record, contains information about what has passed through the horizon and
disappeared," writes Overbye.

To come to this conclusion, Hawking identi쳷蝘ed two underlying problems with his
original assumptions, which is why he says his original calculations
- which suggested that the information inside a black hole would be lost forever
- were wrong.

Those two assumptions were that the vacuum in quantum gravity is unique, and
that black holes have no quantum 'hair'. That's getting a little complex, but what
you need to know is that Hawking has since revised his calculations, and is fairly
sure that black holes have 'soft hair' haloed around them.

This hypothesis has now been peer-reviewed and published in Physical Review
Letters, and researchers are claiming that, while there's more work to be done,
it's a promising step towards solving the information paradox.

"It is important to note that this paper does not solve the black hole information
problem," writes physicist Gary Horowitz from the University of California, Santa
Barbara, in an accompanying commentary.

"First, the analysis must be repeated for gravity, rather than just electromagnetic
쳷蝘elds. The authors are currently pursuing this task, and their preliminary
calculations indicate that the purely gravitational case will be similar," he adds.
"More importantly, the soft hair they introduce is probably not enough to
capture all the information about what falls into a black hole."

His criticism is that it's still unclear whether all the information swallowed up by
a black hole really can be transferred to the soft hair - rather than just an energy
signature of everything that's been lost.

But he admits: "It is certainly possible that, following the path indicated by this
work, further investigation will uncover more hair of this type, and perhaps
eventually lead to a resolution of the black hole information problem."

And that would certainly be a red-letter day in physics. Because we'd be one
step closer to understanding some of the biggest enigmas in the known
Universe - the weirdness that are black holes. 

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What does that mean for the rest of us? As Hawking explained in a talk last year:
"[Black holes] are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. If you feel you
are trapped in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out."

And there might just be a little trace of you lingering on the outside, too.

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