Physicist may have finally cracked the black hole information loss paradox that has befuddled physicists for the past 40 years, according to an article accepted for publication by Physical Review D, which concludes that that an outside observer can never lose objects down a black hole.
The question that the physicists set out to solve is: “what happens once something collapses into a black hole?”
If all information about the collapsing matter is lost, it defies the laws of quantum physics. Yet, in current thinking, once the matter goes over the event horizon and forms a black hole, all information about it is lost.
“If you define the black hole as some place where you can lose objects, then there is no such thing because the black hole evaporates before anything is seen to fall in,” said Vachaspati.
According to the researchers, if black holes exist, information formed in the initial state would disappear in the black hole through a burst of thermal radiation that carries no information about the initial state.
Using the functional Schrodinger formalism, the researchers suggest that information about the energy from radiation is long evaporated before an event horizon forms.
“An outside observer will never lose an object down a black hole,” said Stojkovic. “If you are sitting outside and throwing something into the black hole, it will never pass over but will stay outside the event horizon even if one considers the effects of quantum mechanics. In fact, since in quantum mechanics the observer plays an important role in measurement, the question of formation of an event horizon is much more subtle to consider.”
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