Hum,
You may have heard that the world-famous author of a "Brief History of Time" has said he and other scientists had gotten it wrong -black holes may in fact allow `information` (entropy) to escape, and Hawking`s about to reveal all this Thursday...
Read this first!However another proposed and elegant solution is to use string theory, a theory that holds that all particles in the universe are made of tiny vibrating strings. Latest research has derived an extensive set of equations that strongly suggest that the information continues to exist -- bound up in a giant tangle of strings that fills a black hole from its core to its surface. The finding suggests that black holes are not smooth, featureless entities as scientists have long thought.
Instead, black holes are stringy “fuzz balls.”
This won’t particularly surprise Hawking and Thorne.
Basically for the newbies here, Hawking, professor of mathematics and Thorne, professor of theoretical physics, had a wager/bet that information that enters a black hole is destroyed, while Preskill -- also a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech -- took the opposite view.
The stakes were a set of encyclopaedias.
“
I think that most people gave up on the idea that information was destroyed once the idea of string theory rose to prominence in 1995, It’s just that nobody has been able to prove that the information survives before now”
In the classical model of how black holes form, a super massive object, such as a giant star, collapses to form a very small point of infinite gravity called a singularity. A special region in space surrounds the singularity, and any object that crosses the region’s border, known as the event horizon, is pulled into the black hole, never to return. In theory, not even light can escape from a black hole.
(Hehe, basically it's so small that all the information is squeezed out)
The diameter of the event horizon depends on the mass of the object that formed it. For instance, if the sun collapsed into a singularity, its event horizon would measure approximately 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) across. If Earth followed suit, its event horizon would only measure 1 centimetre (0.4 inches). As to what lies in the region between a singularity and its event horizon, physicists have always drawn a blank, literally. No matter what type of material formed the singularity, the area inside the event horizon was supposed to be devoid of any structure or measurable characteristics. And therein lies the problem.
The problem with the classical theory is that you could use any combination of particles to make the black hole -- protons, electrons, stars, planets, whatever -- and it would make no difference. There must be billions of ways to make a black hole, yet with the classical model the final state of the system is always the same. That kind of uniformity violates the quantum mechanical law of reversibility. Physicists must be able to trace the end product of any process, including the process that makes a black hole, back to the conditions that created it. If all black holes are the same, then no black hole can be traced back to its unique beginning, and any information about the particles that created it is lost forever at the moment the hole forms. Nobody really believes that now, but nobody could ever find anything wrong with the classical argument, either. We can now propose what went wrong.
In 2000, string theorists named the information paradox number eight on their top-ten list of physics problems to be solved during the next millennium. That list included questions such as “what is the lifetime of a proton?” and “how can quantum gravity help explain the origin of the universe?”
When you compute the structure of objects that lie in-between simple string states and large classical black holes. Instead of being tiny objects, they turned out to be large. The picture of a “fuzz ball” continued to hold true for objects more closely resembling a classic black hole.
According to string theory, all the fundamental particles of the universe -- protons, neutrons, and electrons -- are made of different combinations of strings. But even as tiny as strings are, they can form large black holes through a phenomenon called fractional tension. Strings are stretchable, but each carries a certain amount of tension, as does a guitar string. With fractional tension, the tension decreases as the string gets longer.
Just as a long guitar string is easier to pluck than a short guitar string, a long strand of quantum mechanical strings joined together is easier to stretch than a single string. So when great many strings join together, as they would in order to form the many particles necessary for a very massive object like a black hole, the combined ball of string is very stretchy, and expands to a wide diameter. The derived formula for the diameter of a fuzzy black hole made of strings is found to match the diameter of the black hole event horizon suggested by the classical model.
The conjecture suggests that strings continue to exist inside the black hole, and the nature of the strings depends on the particles that made up the original source material, then each black hole is as unique as are the stars, planets, or galaxy that formed it.
The strings from any subsequent material that enters the black hole would remain traceable as well.
That means a black hole can be traced back to its original conditions, and information survives... !
which i suppose is the same as what Hawkings is about to announce...that an object falling into a black-hole somehow `changes` the singularity so that the information is `recorded` and eventually radiated away with "Hawking radiation"...er, but without the strings...
OR
A recent idea provides an alternative to black hole singularities is that matter is transformed into a spherical void surrounded by "an extremely durable form of matter known as a `gravastars`...
This would also get around the problem of the tremendous entropy, or information, that a black hole would hold .
So, theory holds that a black hole should have a billion, billion times more entropy sometimes referred to as states, than the star it formed from. Gravastars do not have this problem, as their entropy is very low, and basically sidestep to contradiction known as the “information paradox.”
The matter inside a gravastar would be akin to the
Bose-Einstein condensate. It would exist in a vacuum, surrounded by an ultra-thin, ultra-cold, ultra-dark bubble, hence the name gra (vitational) va (cuum) star, or gravastar.
So if the problem is already solved, we can only speculate as to why he has created another solution - we`ll know this coming Thursday...
