Threaded's Eclectic Blog

The Information Paradox was caused by a possible conflict between the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics after Professor Stephan Hawking announced that black holes consume information.

This theory was otherwise known as the notion that "black holes have no hair". In other words, the size and shape of a black hole depends not on the body that collapsed to form it, but just the mass and rotation. Professor Hawking provides that since the only thing that is left to measure is the mass and rotation much of the information that falls into a black hole is lost.

Finally, the Hawking Radiation that escapes from the boundry of the event horizon emits particles and therefore the black hole suffers a loss to both mass and energy. If this is true, Susskind and 't Hooft postulates that information can be carried out in the Hawking Radiation.

Anyways I believe it is not really a paradox. What Hawking did was try to combine a model of the small scale: quantum mechanics, with with a model of the large scale: relativity, using a mathematical technique developed by Penrose.

So essentially you have a probabilty system shoe horned into a limits system using a platonist system. Small wonder it is all a little confused. When they dump quantum mechanics for something better it will be so obvious: the information is not lost, it stays there, and just cannot be seen.

# posted by threaded @ 9/17/2005 09:08:00 pm