The Black Hole Information Paradox Comes to an End | Hacker News Reader

The Black Hole Information Paradox Comes to an End

wired.com

96 pointscolinprince26 comments

Discussed a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24940086

So, it being the case that jumping into a black hole will not make you disappear for good, that, particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge, I wonder how this (very speculatively here) would fit with the fascinating concept of Greg Egan's dust theory of conscious existence.

Same could be said for a wood chipper.

I’ll take my chances with the black hole.

I assure you the black hole is more thorough than the wood chipper.

Pretty sure hawking wrote a book with just that concept in it.

Yes, a wonderful children's book called "George's Secret Key to the Universe".

https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B004DI7T9U

If anyone with a strong stem background wants a minimal path to understanding this (or at least seeing what it takes to understand this) on a deeper level I have to recommend Leonard Susskind’s “Introduction To Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe”. It pulls no punches.

Read it with Feynman’s mantra in mind: (paraphrasing/retooling The mantra for lesser mortals like myself) just dive in, read until you don’t understand, then go find a book for that part, and read until you don’t understand, etc etc. I recommend having a “strong stem background” first or else this tactic may never terminate. Maybe Lenny’s Susskind’s theoretical minimum course could fit the bill for most of the background too, but I can’t vouch for how much GR is covered.

I just ordered Susskind, thanks!

Awesome! Good luck!

I suspect if you doggedly pursued this strategy without a strong stem background, you would have one before long.

For sure!

Buried a few paragraphs deep in the article: "The revised semiclassical theory has yet to explain how exactly the information gets out..."

So maybe the old paradox has some life left in it yet.

Headlines are always deliberately dramatic.

It’s not even the headline

> The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End

I think the article was originally titled the same as the OP, but then changed the headline after eventually realizing it was wrong.

Yup. Lots of A/B testing of headlines.

Maybe, but remember that nonconstructive proofs exist, and aren't uncommon in mathematics.

The proposed models described in the article are not proofs. Physics is not the same as math; you don't prove things in physics. You propose models and test them against data. The models being proposed have not been tested against data, so it's way premature to say they resolve anything. They are interesting proposals which hopefully we'll someday be able to test.

Perhaps, but the information paradox itself is a result of theoretical models, not data.

> the information paradox itself is a result of theoretical models, not data

Yes, agreed.

When people lament that physics is at a dead end, I look at stories like this and think 'what are you talking about?' This decade I think we will see significant breakthroughs in theoretical physics.

But practically speaking, currently it is at the dead end:

Results like this are highly speculative and unfalsifiable.

There is no unifying theory in sight.

String Theory at this point is essentially a pseudo-scientific cult (see Lee Smolin’s book for explanation).

Further advancements require experimental energies we can’t afford.

Any advancements are unlikely to produce practical results, like stable bridge or working GPS.

The implications about non-local physics are interesting. There is true weirdness to do with locality, space, time, and propagation of information that crops up again and again, providing lots of cracks to pick at. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876598 Condensation of matter at extremely low energies remains an active area of research. Making those macro-scale quantum-mechanical phenomena happen at room temperature is a massively active area of research, because the applications touch every aspect of modern technology.

> “There’s the physical black hole and then there’s the simulated one in the quantum computer, and there can be a replica wormhole connecting those,” said Douglas Stanford, a theoretical physicist at Stanford and a member of the West Coast team. This idea is an example of a proposal by Maldacena and Leonard Susskind of Stanford in 2013 that quantum entanglement can be thought of as a wormhole. The wormhole, in turn, provides a secret tunnel through which information can escape the interior.

What is this saying? Say we have a method for producing microscopic black holes, and a quantum computer capable of simulating them. What's the experiment we can do to show that this happens? We hit the real thing with a photon and it shows up in the simulation?

This is quite a haunting phenomenon, really... the path integral is tossing up these wormhole things because they’re the only way it can express nonlocality sounds a lot to me like “setting up tunnels and sockets”.

The idea that by feeding a simulation of an object all the information about that object in real time causes it the simulation to somehow mirror the real item doesn’t surprise me; the reverse, namely that manipulating the simulation would also have an effect on the object being simulated, is a very different matter and collides with my intuition.

I dislike the "encrypted password" metaphor, but this is some pretty great science journalism/writing.

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