Hawking, new theory on information paradox right or qwrong?

[berty]

Hawking, new theory on information paradox right or wrong?

Does anyone have any views on Stephen Hawking amendment to his 30 year old theory of black holes and the *information paradox that was recently challenged?

Once past the event horizon information is lost forever and only the energy emitted during the tearing apart of matter at the event horizon escapes in the form of high energy particles such as X rays, gamma rays etc. When the black hole evaporates the information inside is lost to the Universe. According to his critics, this violates the first law of thermodynamics and therefore cannot be true.

He now apparently states that his theory is still true in our Universe; however, the information lost is offset by information being retained in a sufficiently large number of the infinite alternate Universes where no black holes exist.
This seems to me to be a bit of a rushed and unconvincing rebuff for one reason in particular.
Unless some of the alternative Universes produce extra information, it doesn’t matter how many there are as there will still be a net loss of information overall.
Another point is; what kind of information is lost?
If it is simply the description of how common particles, atoms and molecules are constructed and behave, then does it matter if this information is lost?
After all the information is duplicated in every other identical particle, atom and molecule throughout the Universe.
Or is because eventually entropy, time and the proliferation of black holes will cause the loss of every shred of information?
Does this really matter as when entropy reaches its maximum, the Universe will cease to exist along with all information of whatever origin?

 

[Intuitive]

The Universe will never cease to exist, It will simply be converted from one form to another. One huge recycling center awaits us all.

 

[Agnostic]

Until there is a unified field theory, I think all we can do at most is speculate.

 

[εllipse]

He now apparently states that his theory is still true in our Universe; however, the information lost is offset by information being retained in a sufficiently large number of the infinite alternate Universes where no black holes exist.

Where did you get that from? That isn't the view I got from reading this paper, in which Hawking states:

The information remains firmly in our universe. I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.

(I got this quote from one of my blog postings a few months back. Arxiv seems to be down right now, so I can't check the paper to be sure, but I think the quote was on page 5.)