Stephen Hawking's solution to the black hole information paradox
© Provided by AFP…
Stephen Hawking and his co-authors Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger have written a paper entitled ‘Soft Hair on Black Holes’ attempting to explain a problem that has baffled scientists for decades: the black hole information paradox.
The paradox lies between the general theory of relativity, which says anything pulled into a black hole is lost forever, and quantum mechanics, which says the opposite: that information cannot be completely destroyed and must be fundamentally conserved. So where does it go?
According to Hawking’s latest theory, a particle being sucked into a black hole leaves traces of itself at the event horizon, which is the point of no return for a particle entering a black hole. These traces are in the form of soft photons that have no energy. The particle itself is lost in the hole, but its information ‘hairs’ linger on the boundary, leaving a watermark of what has gone through it.
"We show that when a charged particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the black hole. So it adds 'hair' to the black hole," Strominger told Scientific American. "And more generally if any particle goes in - because all particles carry mass and are coupled to gravity – they always add a soft graviton. So there’s a kind of recording device.”
© Provided by AFP…
Stephen Hawking and his co-authors Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger have written a paper entitled ‘Soft Hair on Black Holes’ attempting to explain a problem that has baffled scientists for decades: the black hole information paradox.
The paradox lies between the general theory of relativity, which says anything pulled into a black hole is lost forever, and quantum mechanics, which says the opposite: that information cannot be completely destroyed and must be fundamentally conserved. So where does it go?
According to Hawking’s latest theory, a particle being sucked into a black hole leaves traces of itself at the event horizon, which is the point of no return for a particle entering a black hole. These traces are in the form of soft photons that have no energy. The particle itself is lost in the hole, but its information ‘hairs’ linger on the boundary, leaving a watermark of what has gone through it.
"We show that when a charged particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the black hole. So it adds 'hair' to the black hole," Strominger told Scientific American. "And more generally if any particle goes in - because all particles carry mass and are coupled to gravity – they always add a soft graviton. So there’s a kind of recording device.”
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