brcooke
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Hi, I'm not a physicist so the answer to this question may be elementary but I can't figure it out for myself:
Black holes are famous because (almost) nothing can escape from them. Once an observer has crossed the event horizon, no more contact may be made with him or her. Thus it will forever be impossible to know what the interior of a black hole is like, because observers that go inside will never be able to communicate with us.
Everyone knows that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its area, and that there are only 3 parameters necessary to describe a black hole: its area, charge, and spin (right?). All of the books I've read about the subject say that astronomical-scale black holes have very high entropy (the exception being very small black holes created in the lab).
Now, my understanding of entropy is that it is proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates that could underlie a single macrostate. My question is: Since it is impossible to know anything about the interior of a black hole, and thus anything about the microstates within it, how can black holes have entropy at all? And contrary to the popular assumption that the entropy of black holes is very large, given how easy it is to define a black hole, shouldn't that indicate that their entropy is in fact very low?
Thanks for your help!
Brad.
Black holes are famous because (almost) nothing can escape from them. Once an observer has crossed the event horizon, no more contact may be made with him or her. Thus it will forever be impossible to know what the interior of a black hole is like, because observers that go inside will never be able to communicate with us.
Everyone knows that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its area, and that there are only 3 parameters necessary to describe a black hole: its area, charge, and spin (right?). All of the books I've read about the subject say that astronomical-scale black holes have very high entropy (the exception being very small black holes created in the lab).
Now, my understanding of entropy is that it is proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates that could underlie a single macrostate. My question is: Since it is impossible to know anything about the interior of a black hole, and thus anything about the microstates within it, how can black holes have entropy at all? And contrary to the popular assumption that the entropy of black holes is very large, given how easy it is to define a black hole, shouldn't that indicate that their entropy is in fact very low?
Thanks for your help!
Brad.