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The fate of information that falls into a black hole is a mystery. Can it ever get out or does it disappear forever ? Now, new work shows how in theory you can retrieve something from a black hole.
Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues approached the problem using techniques gleaned from the art of quantum teleportation, which involves moving quantum information from one place to another.
Quantum teleportation is based on entangled particles. When particles are entangled, measuring the state of one particle instantly influences the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are. An oft-called-upon example involves a couple called Alice and Bob, each of whom has access to one of a pair of entangled particles. To begin the teleportation, Bob sends one bit of information – a bit being the basic unit of information – to Alice. She uses that bit and her share of the entangled pair to move one bit of quantum information, or a qubit, from Bob's location to where she is.
"That is the trick of quantum teleportation," Carroll. "What we realised is that the black hole naturally provides you with that kind of set up."
[Paper]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03592
(Score: 2) by Francis on Thursday July 23 2015, @04:44PM
Right, but this is the first step towards a testable hypothesis and if we're really lucky they'll invent a crapload of useful stuff in the pursuit of testing it.
More likely though, they'll check the math, determine whether or not the math is sound and then accept it if the math is OK. That's OK for math, but a mathematical equation will happily slam a rocket into the moon without fuel or crash a bus load of orphans into an ocean. Math has no problem with either scenario as long as it doesn't violate any mathematical rules. The physics and engineering would suggest that the former isn't even possible.
I do think that we need to reconsider funding physics that can't be tested and take that money and fund the people that are inventing the things necessary to perform the experiments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @08:08PM
We will not be safe until we rid the earth of these terrorists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @09:26PM
Are you doing the old argument of "those researchers should have tried to cure cancer instead" ? Or that everything must be done for concrete, practical results NOW and report to shareholder before next quarter ? Or I misunderstand you, but you're ambiguous.
Sometimes fundamental, or useless research sits in a drawer 10, 50 or 200 years before finding their practical application completely randomly. I suppose you're happy to have your internet banking secured by encryption. But maybe mathematicians shouldn't have wasted their time for literally hundred of years to work on abstract and useless toys suchs as Galois fields, elliptic curves or Riemann surfaces, and should have worked instead on designing better carts and plows for agriculture.
If, for their abstract thought-experiment, the researchers in this article had to develop auxiliary mathematical tools, than happen to be better at formalizing quantum teleportation, that happen to bring the break-through to quantum computing in 10 years in a way completely unrelated to black-hole spins, and be industrialized to the iPhone-Q to bring the current supercomputing power in a hand-held device with 1 week battery, will you complain that funding should have been prioritized in 2015 to perfom the experiments about a practical black-hole-spin-o-meter, which, however, will never have a useful application for 4000 more years ?