Planck E PressCenter Articles
The Information Paradox
Date published: 2023-12-06
Date modified: 2023-12-06
Reading time: 00:01:07
“All information looks like noise until you break the code.”
Neal Stephenson
My book Being Data is about information.
What it is, its scope, influence, meaning, and existence. And this fixation on the subject, so deep as to result in the book, has its origins in the information paradox, which in turn begins with Hawking radiation.
Way before Hawking became interested in black holes and devoted much of his time to proving their existence. In the process, the genius scientist confirmed the emission of radiation from these frightening cosmic mouths.
The paradox arises from the exclusive emission of thermal radiation. According to quantum mechanics, information cannot be destroyed, since the observed state of a context always carries traces of its previous state. Thus, if all that is emitted from the black hole is thermal radiation, all the information that has been swallowed must have been destroyed.
In the name of coherence, let me make an aside. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant theoretical physicist, and with his admirable modesty, which manifested itself as lightness and humor in his treatment of the Cosmos, he thought.
That's what theoretical physicists do.
We cannot put the cosmos in a laboratory and apply our science, which makes us God's elder brothers. So we play with hypotheses, cultivate ideas, and generate theories that are good for as long as they are valid, but which will be replaced by new ones.
Stephen was so fantastically coherent that he played with black holes and white holes; with big bangs and big crunches. In doing so, he always maintained his commitment to the immense difference between map and territory.
Finally, scientists from Birmingham have just proposed that the maintenance of coherence between Hawking radiation and the emission of information by black holes would lie in the non-thermal quality of the radiation and the existence -in the black hole- of quantum hair.
Stephen would have loved that.
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