ikenbot: Black Hole Firewall: Trouble On The Edge Ever wondered what happens to things as they are c

ikenbot:Black Hole Firewall: Trouble On The EdgeEver wondered what happens to things as they are consumed by the black hole, the left over matter of dead stars? For a time, it used to be okay to assume matter was destroyed once it entered into a black hole, spaghettified and all.. but it turned out that this couldn’t be further away from the truth. NewScientists Anil Ananthaswamy has a wonderful 3 page piece getting into full details of this history and what questions scientists are asking now. If you love black holes, this is a definite recommend. Although registration (completely free!) is required to view the whole article. It’s pretty insightful and accurately presents the problems currently being faced with how black holes do what they do:“Paradoxes are good in physics,” reflects John Preskill. “They help to point the way towards important discoveries.” Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity offer plenty to choose from. There’s the cat that can be dead and alive at the same time. Or the Back to the Future-style time traveller who kills his own grandfather, rendering his own birth impossible. Or the twins who disagree on their age after one returns from a near light-speed trip to a neighbouring star. Each perplexing scenario forces us to examine the fine print of the problem, thereby advancing our understanding of the theory behind it. A case in point is Einstein, whose own theories came from trying to resolve the paradoxes of his time.Image: Ring of fireSam ChiversNow Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is scratching his head over the latest one to surface. Nicknamed the black hole firewall paradox, it comes about when you consider what happens to someone falling into a black hole.With the nearest black hole more than 1000 light years away, the question is very much a theoretical one. Yet just by studying such a possibility, physicists are hoping to make a breakthrough in their efforts to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of quantum gravity – one of the most intractable problems in physics today.Black holes have long been fertile breeding grounds for paradoxes. Back in 1974, Stephen Hawking, along with Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, famously showed that black holes are not entirely black. Instead, they radiate energy known as Hawking radiation comprising photons and other quantum particles – an agonisingly slow process that eventually causes the black hole to evaporate completely.Hawking spotted a problem with this picture. The radiation seemed so random that he surmised it couldn’t carry any information about the stuff that had fallen in. So as the black hole evaporates, the information it holds must eventually disappear. Yet this is in direct conflict with a central tenet of quantum physics, which says that information cannot be destroyed. The black hole information paradox was born.Over the decades, physicists have struggled with this paradox. Hawking thought that black holes destroyed information and the answer was to question quantum mechanics. Others disagreed. After all, Hawking’s idea came from his efforts to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics – a mathematical feat so elusive that he was forced to make approximations. Preskill even made a bet with Hawking that black holes don’t destroy information.Several arguments suggest that Hawking was wrong. One of the most compelling comes from thinking about what happens as the evaporating black hole gets smaller and smaller. If information can’t escape or be destroyed, then more and more has to be stored in an ever-shrinking volume. But if this is the case, quantum theory says the probability for making a tiny black hole increases from virtually nothing to almost infinity wherever matter collides against matter. “You should have seen it at the Large Hadron Collider, you should have seen it at Fermilab, you should have seen it in tiny room-sized particle accelerators from the 1930s,” says Don Marolf, a theorist at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). “You should see it when you go and jump up and down on the grass.”Obviously that hasn’t happened. The other possibility – that matter and the information it carries can leak out from a black hole – is unlikely. Any material that falls in would need to travel faster than light to escape the black hole’s fearsome gravity.Perhaps, instead, the answer lies with the Hawking radiation itself. Maybe it isn’t so featureless. “A common reaction was that Hawking had simply been careless,” says Joseph Polchinski, also at UCSB. “It wasn’t that information was lost, it was that he hadn’t kept track of it enough.”Yet all early efforts to do away with the paradox proved unsuccessful. “Hawking had identified a really deep problem,” says Polchinski.As it happened, Hawking changed his mind in 2004, partly due to work by an Argentinian physicist called Juan Maldacena (see “Hawking’s change of heart”). Black holes don’t destroy information after all, he conceded. He honoured the bet he made with Preskill and presented him with an encyclopaedia of baseball, which Preskill likened to a black hole, because it was heavy and it took effort to get information out of it.Into The Abyss..[Full Article] -- source link

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