#BLACK HOLE FACTS SERIES#

“I’m very resistant to people who come in and say, ‘I’ve got a solution in just quantum mechanics and gravity,’” said Nick Warner of the University of Southern California. Some still think that Hawking got it right and that string theory or other novel physics has to come into play if information is to escape. Wormholes, the holographic principle, emergent space-time, quantum entanglement, quantum computers: Nearly every concept in fundamental physics these days makes an appearance, making the subject both captivating and confounding.Īnd not everyone is convinced. The work is highly mathematical and has a Rube Goldberg quality to it, stringing together one calculational trick after another in a way that is hard to interpret. What it all means is being intensely debated in Zoom calls and webinars. “The hope was, if we could answer this question - if we could see the information coming out - in order to do that we would have had to learn about the microscopic theory,” said Geoff Penington of the University of California, Berkeley, alluding to a fully quantum theory of gravity. So they worry they may have solved this one problem without achieving the broader closure they sought. Had the calculation involved deep features of quantum gravity rather than a light dusting, it might have been even harder to pull off, but once that was accomplished, it would have illuminated those depths. You might expect the authors to celebrate, but they say they also feel let down. “It’s a landmark calculation,” said Eva Silverstein of Stanford University, a leading theoretical physicist who was not directly involved. “That is the most exciting thing that has happened in this subject, I think, since Hawking,” said one of the co-authors, Donald Marolf of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The revised semiclassical theory has yet to explain how exactly the information gets out, but such has been the pace of discovery in the past two years that theorists already have hints of the escape mechanism. Not only does information spill out, anything new that falls in is regurgitated almost immediately.

The hole transforms from a hermit kingdom to a vigorously open system. Muted at first, these effects come to dominate when the black hole gets to be extremely old. They have found additional semiclassical effects - new gravitational configurations that Einstein’s theory permits, but that Hawking did not include. That is what the authors of the new studies dispute. Any further progress would have to treat gravity, too, as quantum. Physicists figured that Hawking had nailed the semiclassical calculation. Hawking and others sought to describe matter in and around black holes using quantum theory, but they continued to describe gravity using Einstein’s classical theory - a hybrid approach that physicists call “semiclassical.” Although the approach predicted new effects at the perimeter of the hole, the interior remained strictly sealed off. The more sophisticated understanding of black holes developed by Stephen Hawking and his colleagues in the 1970s did not question this principle. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the gravity of a black hole is so intense that nothing can escape it. This is a peculiar role reversal for gravity. Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself - just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects. But the new calculations, though inspired by string theory, stand on their own, with nary a string in sight. Most physicists have long assumed it would that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole.

#BLACK HOLE FACTS SERIES#

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years.

Black hole facts