Stephen Hawking said that information is destroyed in black holes, contradicting quantum physics. But a new study claims his famous paradox is wrong
A new scientific study claims to have found the solution to one of the great mysteries of modern physics: Stephen Hawking’s black hole paradox. If the study is right, it would prove the eminent scientist wrong, paving a new path with far-reaching implications for science and quantum physics.
Titled “Quantum Gravitational Corrections to Black Hole Particle Creation,” the study explains how black holes work and what is the mechanism that may allow supposedly destroyed information to actually survive and escape, something Hawking said was impossible even though It was against the laws of quantum physics.
What have they discovered? Black holes are objects so dense and massive that their gravity turns them into gigantic vacuum cleaners that suck in everything around them, including light and information. When something gets too close to a black hole, gravity grabs it, they get sucked in, and theoretically disappear forever. Only Hawking radiation escapes the trap, but it is thermal radiation that does not contain any information.
In the 1970s, Hawking applied the rules of quantum mechanics to black holes and posited that an object that falls into one of these objects disappears forever, along with any information encoded in it. His question was simple: “If things get sucked into a black hole and disappear, where does all this information go?” In the end, he argued, the black hole was destined to disappear altogether. But, according to the rules of quantum physics, information always survives and can never be destroyed. This paradox would haunt him all his life.
If their calculations are correct, the study would eliminate this paradox. As the lead author of the study — Xavier Calmet, professor of physics at the University of Sussex — points out to Live Science, this “is the last nail in the coffin for the paradox because we now understand the exact physical phenomenon by which information escapes of a decaying black hole.” According to the work of Calmet and his colleagues, the information is held in “quantum hair,” a remnant of matter that is destroyed when it is sucked into the black hole. This quantum hair is a slight imprint in its gravitational field, they say.
In search of the unique model This is like a fingerprint that tells us what the black hole is made of. The study helps us understand how this fingerprint affects how particles are created and how they escape from the black hole. This is important because it helps us understand how information can escape from a black hole, something we didn’t know before, and it would give us the information to reconstruct its history back to the original star that gave rise to the hole.
The new study describes the information escape mechanism, showing how the amplitudes of thermal radiation that we know escapes from the hole depend on quantum hair-motivated corrections. The study would thus solve this puzzle that appears when the predictions of quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined, and could lead to new ideas in other areas of physics such as string theory and quantum gravity, helping to achieve the holy grail. of physics that would unify the two models that explain the universe but that now live in apparent contradiction.
source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269323001545