STEPHEN HAWKING was a great scientist who studied and discovered a lot of things about black holes. One thing he countered upon was the "Information Paradox". What is a paradox, first? Everywhere you go, you'll get the definition of a paradox as a statement that contradicts itself. So, now why is something like "information" linked with something strange like a "paradox". How can information get stuck in a paradoxical loop? And most importantly, WHAT information is being talked about here?
Black holes are the most powerful things in the universe. Powerful, but fascinating at the same time. Fascinating, but terrible at the same time as well! They are strong enough to rip apart anything into particles. But the most dangerous power they have, as was predicted by Stephen Hawking, was that Black holes can delete the universe itself!
A black hole is formed when a large large very large amount of matter is concentrated in a very tiny space. That point is known as the singularity and gravity is so strong, that it has an infinite force in there. Nothing can escape the black hole, once it gets too close. That's why we don't really know what is going inside a black hole. But we do know quite a lot of interesting things about it from Stephen Hawking's famous Brief History Of Time.
Black holes radiate their mass away, like a hot pot on a stove losing its water as steam. This is known as Hawking Radiation, named after the great astronomer Stephen Hawking. Now black holes also give out mass, but so much slowly. So much that after trillions of years also, it would have lost just about a trillionth of its mass. That is so so small. But it speeds up as it is going on. And one day, it will die leaving behind some radiation. But there is one problem, all the mass and stuff it has gobbled from the universe would also be deleted. Really? Will the universe be deleted permanently?
This is the Information Paradox. What is information here? It is nothing tangible. It is just the arrangement of particles.
Without information, everything in the universe would be the same. It makes sense, right? Because if you take any element and change its arrangement of particles, then you obtain different substances. If there were no changes, everything would be same.
Now, here comes the interesting part. According to quantum mechanics, information is indestructible. Just like in chemistry, we have learnt that matter can't be created or destroyed. It just changes its forms. Similarly, information here can change shape, size whatever, but it can not be lost just like that!
As we saw in the Parallel Universe Theory post, that if you knew the position and momentum of a particle, then hypothetically, you could see the entire universe right back to the Big Bang. But we know that according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, that is not possible.
The information paradox was a serious problem. It was like a math question that was very difficult to solve. Somehow, it was breaking the rules of mathematics. So, did we get some solutions to this paradox? Let's see more.
Let's assume that the information do gets lost forever. But physics says that information can never be lost. We can't do anything to the black hole, but we might change physics rules itself! Now that sounds like a crazy and idiotic idea because then, we would have to throw out a lot of stuff, rules and will have to deny the rules that were excellently proved to be true. Just because of this paradox! The Lost Information Paradox.
Let's assume another scenario where information is hidden. Maybe a small part of the black hole splits off and forms a new universe itself. All the information is transferred in this strange place, where we could never observe or interact with, but technically, it is not lost. It is nice that the information is not deleted, but it is not helpful as well. Just a piece of waste.
Or, we had been looking everything the wrong way itself! YEAH? What if the information is neither lost nor hidden? We know that black holes trap information and might delete it later, but we never thought about what they do with it in the meantime. Where do black holes store their information? To keep more information, black holes increase their surface area itself. The information gets painted on the surface. This leads to something interesting.
If information is actually stored on the boundary of a black hole, then the Hawking Radiation has a chance of learning about the information. If everything that falls into the black hole is stored on its event horizon, that basically means that 3D objects are encoded on a flat surface. This is called a Hologram. Therefore, a black hole is like a hologram because everything inside it is encoded on its event horizon.
We need to explore more about the reality. If hologram works out from stuff thrown in a black hole, then it might also be true universally as well. Are we also in a hologram? Are we in a simulation? These superb arguments are great to explore in.
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