Black Hole Information Paradox

May 30, 2021

Black Hole Information Paradox

The universe is not stagnant, it expands every minute, every second at an accelerating pace. It came into being through a colossal explosion -The Big Bang. It gives birth to subatomic particles, stars, dust, gas clouds, etc. These bodies then carry on with their cycles. When massive stars run out of energy, they collapse into dense bodies like neutron stars or black holes through a supernova explosion.

Source - nasa.gov

A black hole is a region in spacetime where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape it! Black holes consist of an event horizon, the surface layer of the black hole, and a singularity, the region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite. The theory of general relativity suggests that mass is stretched when thrown into a black hole.

In 1974, English Physicist Stephen Hawking discovered Hawking Radiation.

What is Hawking Radiation, to be exact?

Hawking Radiation states that black holes are slowly losing their mass. The hot, dense bodies seem to evaporate over a long period of time. This process is so slow that a black hole with a mass of our sun would take 10 billion billion billion billion billion years to lose 0.0000001 % of the mass.

Source - quora

But let's say some information is lost in the black hole, what happens to it when the black hole evaporates?

Well, we're not really sure yet. Two major outcomes could be possible :

1. The information is deleted.

Source - stackoverflow

Quantum Information is the information about the state of the object in a quantum system. All around the universe, the atoms remain the same but, the information keeps on changing. Suggesting, that the basic building blocks of everything in the universe are the same. According to Quantum Physics, information can never be deleted. Even if the object is destroyed, its quantum information remains and can be reconstructed. For example, if we crush a piece of rock, we get sand and minerals. This can never be turned into rock again. Unless all the atoms and properties are measured properly, you could recreate the rock.

But this is where black holes trip us out.

It is a potential possibility that a black hole can delete information. If this is the case, that will mean that we'd have to abandon all our laws of physics and start from scratch again.

2. The information is secure

Unlike other bodies, it turns out every time a new piece of information is added into a black hole. It settles on the surface layer, causing the black hole to grow a tiny bit. This way, the information is given out through Hawking Radiation. So, fortunately, information is safe and sound and we don't have to redo physics again.

But if this turns out to be the truth, it could be a slap in the face for our reality. That would mean that the universe is a hologram. That is, if everything that falls into a black hole is stored in the event horizon, then three-dimensional stuff is encoded on a flat surface. And similarly, everything that we see in the universe is a hologram of the encoding on the flat surface.