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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

For me, this was the money quote:

> The black hole information loss problem is not a math problem. It’s not like trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis. You cannot solve the black hole information loss problem with math alone. You need data, there is no data, and there won’t be any data. Which is why the black hole information loss problem is for all practical purposes unsolvable.

We lack experimental data. We lack a way to get experimental data. All we have is some beautiful mathematics. That's nice, but we don't know if it corresponds to reality. That's true of the paper under discussion, and it's true of all the other papers proposing solutions as well.

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This is not a convincing argument. We may not have data, but as in other problems in physics we may have indirect ways to get evidence. These indirect ways may not be apparent nowadays, but may become in the future.

As far as I understand, Nordström's second theory of gravitation is a mathematically self-consistent theory for gravitation, and the only way to decide between it and Einstein's theory was by comparing to observations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordstr%C3%B6m%27s_theory_of_g...

Indirect data is still data. What she's saying is that math equations aren't data and hence math equations alone can't solve this problem.

Sure, but until such a time, the problem will remain unsolvable.

Intuitionism has been knocking on theoretical physics' door for a while now.

It leaves me wondering, is that data fundamentally impossible to collect, or do we just not know how yet? Sure, maybe the problem is unsolvable by math alone but that doesn't make it mathematically unsolvable. Maybe we could build or capture a black hole in the lab, put detectors all around it, and watch it evaporate, or something.

They did this in Earth by David Brin.

Some theorize that evaporating micro black holes could/should be an observable effect of the Large Hadron Collider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole

It might not really be fundamentally impossible, but it could be completely unachievable practically - harder than unscrambling an omelette back into an intact, uncooked egg.

> We lack experimental data. We lack a way to get experimental data

Sounds like pseudoscience to me.

I wonder what happens if a particle is in early orbit in a black hole and another black hole gets close by and changes the net force. Is that impossible somehow? Can't you grab that particle with a spoon and bail if you are quick?

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