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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 08 2020, @07:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the garbage-in-garbage-out dept.

Nature's cosmic hard drive? Black holes could store information like holograms:

Nearly 30 years ago, theoretical physicists introduced the "holographic principle," a mind-bending theory positing that our three-dimensional universe is actually a hologram. Now physicists are applying that same principle to black holes, arguing in a new paper published in Physical Review X that a black hole's information is contained within a two-dimensional surface, which is able to reproduce an image of the black hole in three dimensions—just like the holograms we see in everyday life.

Black holes as described by general relativity are simple objects. All you need to describe them mathematically is their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge. So there would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. That information is lost.

But problems arise when quantum gravity enters the picture because the rules of quantum mechanics hold that information can never be destroyed. And in quantum mechanics, black holes are incredibly complex objects and thus should contain a great deal of information. As we reported previously, Jacob Bekenstein realized in 1974 that black holes also have a temperature. Stephen Hawking tried to prove him wrong but wound up proving him right instead, concluding that black holes therefore had to produce some kind of thermal radiation.

So black holes must also have entropy—technically, a means of determining how many different ways you can rearrange the atoms of an object and still have it look pretty much the same. Hawking was the first to calculate that entropy. He also introduced the notion of "Hawking radiation": the black hole will emit a tiny bit of energy, decreasing its mass by a corresponding amount. Over time, the black hole will evaporate. The smaller the black hole, the more quickly it disappears. But what then happens to the information it contained? Is it truly destroyed, thereby violating quantum mechanics, or is it somehow preserved in the Hawking radiation?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 08 2020, @08:15PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 08 2020, @08:15PM (#1004981)

    Its an English Language problem in the sense of store a book of printed data on a shelf vs store power in a battery.

    Imagine a water planet and pelting the F out of it with SONAR beeps. In practice the SONAR beeps turn into heat and the water planet radiates the heat away into space at night and doesn't infinitely get hotter.

    So... what happens to a black hole that has infinite SONAR like beeps of every little piece of space junk that ever hit it? It can't very well transmit IR light away. There's that Hawking radiation stuff of course because of virtual particles on the hole boundary itself.

    Thats the origin of the quantum hologram popular science type talk. All the infinity of SONAR like pings of every piece of space junk that ever hit that black hole is still bouncing around as phase and amplitude data. If you could sense all the data at one instant for the entire hole you could reverse engineer the SONAR data and plot out that a piece of space crap hit in a certain location at a certain time.

    There are bugs in the concept along the lines of if you ever got a non-chaos snapshot of the entire earth you "could" plot out the weather patterns for the next billion years in advance. Of course there are practical implementation issues with that kind of thinking.

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