What is the Information Loss Paradox and How Does Hawking Radiation Relate?

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around the information loss paradox in the context of black holes and Hawking radiation. Participants explore the implications of general relativity (GR) and quantum mechanics (QM) regarding the fate of information that falls into black holes, examining theoretical concepts and potential resolutions to the paradox.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested
  • Conceptual clarification
  • Exploratory

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants seek a layman’s explanation of the information loss paradox without technical jargon.
  • One participant explains that GR posits black holes as entities that lose all information about matter that falls into them, while QM suggests that information is preserved, creating a paradox.
  • Another participant questions how information can be considered lost if it exists on the black hole's surface, suggesting that the hard drive's information is still present but inaccessible due to the black hole's escape velocity.
  • A different viewpoint argues that GR's assertion of lost information is incorrect, proposing that the initial conditions of matter can be reproduced from the state of a black hole at a finite time after collapse.
  • One participant introduces the idea that particles falling into a black hole may be virtual, implying that their information is not physical and thus does not contribute to the paradox.
  • Concerns are raised regarding the concept of microreversibility in QM and its compatibility with the uncertainty principle, questioning the validity of reconstructing information from Hawking radiation.
  • Another participant speculates that information may be stored on the black hole's surface as waves, suggesting a correlation between the merging of black holes and the information carried by Hawking radiation.
  • One participant reflects on the philosophical implications of treating physics theories as complete descriptions of reality, emphasizing the limitations of both classical and quantum mechanics in addressing irreversibility.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express multiple competing views regarding the information loss paradox, with no consensus reached on the resolution of the paradox or the implications of GR and QM.

Contextual Notes

Participants highlight various assumptions and limitations in their arguments, including the nature of information in black holes, the role of virtual particles, and the implications of the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.

  • #31
RandallB said:
But that is why different philosophies are directly relevant to science.
Where else do new concepts about the fundamental nature of reality come from but from differing views or “scientific religions”
New concepts come from the same place they always have-- unexpected experiments or observations, not philosophies.
It is not the job of referees to decide if the philosophic belief that might be contained within an idea; it is actually a problem that they often do reject scientific doctrine not in line with their own even if the ideas in the papaer may be workable.
The role of the referee is to evaluate the axioms chosen, not from the perspective you discussed of what is "right" or "wrong", but rather what is or is not appropriate to the goals of the investigation. That's the point, "doctrine" and "philosophy" should play no role at all. That may not always happen in practice, but I brought it up because you said that you can evaluate what is "right" without first tailoring the very meaning of that word to the given situation.
And papers shouldn’t be considered Right or even Accurate because they are published, only useful.
I agree-- which is exactly why you do have to first consider how the word "wrong" gets used before you can be a referee. You said that your interest was only in what is more accurate, and that's fine for you, but it means you cannot be a referee. I was establishing the importance in not applying black and white meanings of right and wrong to theories, especially when based on a philosophical rather than a practical stance.
For example there are several models proposed for an atom (cubic, plum-pudding, Saturnian, Rutherford, Bohr) using any of those is not a disqualification for a paper; Only that the ideas and how they are used may actually be useful in the context of the paper.
That is the point I am making. Contrast that to "the search for the right philosophy".

For example, Bohr circular orbits in the Bohr Atom is well understood to be wrong and an incorrect description of atomic structure. But even modern papers still use Bohr circular orbits as an analogy of reality that accurately helps describe fundamental elements of nature such as the fine structure constant. ]

I don’t think the current scientific consensus that these atomic models are ‘wrong’ yet some remain useful as scientific analogies of reality, will ever change to declare one of them as a correct and complete description of atomic structure.
Again, you are only repeating my point. You said that you personally were "more interested in figuring out what is wrong, to get to a more correct solution".
In the same way I believe QM will always serve as an accurate analogy of reality but someday we will be able to demonstrate that QM and Bohr as wrong to consider it a complete description of reality.
I'm there already. I take it as the default position of science that our search is for accurate analogies of reality, not "a complete description". When did we start thinking we were doing something else? Or I suppose the better question is, when should we have stopped thinking that?
But it does not explain what HUP is, it only gives an analogy of it.
We never explain what anything is. Do we explain what gravity is? Or time? We have no idea what these things are, but we build models for how they work or ways to measure their results. That's why we will never have a "complete description", the best we can do is unify what we have found to work. Even that seems unlikely to me, but the effort is noble as long as we don't mistake it for something it isn't.
But an incorrect analogy of nature because it is incomplete;
If that were true, then no analogy of nature could possibly be correct, because as we agreed, no analogy of nature is complete. An analogy need not be complete to be correct-- that would be an identity, and would not even serve the purpose of an analogy.

Individual particles of water and items of fluff floating on the water are rearranged as dispersion has moved them to new locations.
I didn't say the information in the particles was reversible (they are a complex system, which is from whence I claimed all irreversibility originates), I said the information in the wave was reversible-- the latter being the analog of the HUP.
This like many other examples support HUP & the one way direction of thermodynamic entropy, and tells me that “information conservation” should not be considered a requirement of reality.
But the mechanism you cite, the action of the particles, has nothing to do with the HUP-- that action was happily considered irreversible long before quantum mechanics, that's my point. It is not something fundamental that makes it irreversible, it is how we choose to treat the system, out of practical considerations. Again, it is not "what is right", it is "what axioms we choose and why".

And IMO HUP defines QM as not requiring information conservation.
Refuting that is why I mentioned the information reversibility in a wave that is governed by the classical analog to the HUP.

To the extent that some issue refereed papers stating otherwise; I’ve not seen any give satisfactory detail on how information is conserved from the past anywhere in nature, without nature propagating a Super-deterministic future.
It is not the universe that is either reversible or super-deterministic, it is our chosen axioms that either are or are not. The axioms of quantum mechanics are reversible and deterministic, but not super-deterministic because they are unpredictable in how they will couple to the complex classical systems that make measurements.
 
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  • #32
what if hawking radiation is not proved..i think it is not yet proved...will this give any answer for this paradox
 

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