what is stephen howking paradox
Answers
Answer:
The black hole information paradox is a puzzle resulting from the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Calculations suggest that physical information could permanently disappear in a black hole, allowing many physical states to devolve into the same state.
hope this helps u
pls mark it as the brainliest
Answer:
ABSTRACTIONS BLOG
Why Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Puzzle Keeps Puzzling
By
JENNIFER OUELLETTE
March 14, 2018
The renowned British physicist, who died at 76, left behind a riddle that could eventually lead his successors to the theory of quantum gravity.
12
READ LATER
Photo of Stephen Hawking in 1979 in Princeton, New Jersey.
The physicist Stephen Hawking in 1979 in Princeton, New Jersey.
Santi Visalli/Getty Images
The renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking, who died today at 76, was something of a betting man, regularly entering into friendly wagers with his colleagues over key questions in theoretical physics. “I sensed when Stephen and I first met that he would enjoy being treated irreverently,” wrote John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, earlier today on Twitter. “So in the middle of a scientific discussion I could interject, ‘What makes you so sure of that, Mr. Know-It-All?’ knowing that Stephen would respond with his eyes twinkling: ‘Wanna bet?’”
Abstractions navigates promising ideas in science and mathematics. Journey with us and join the conversation.
See all Abstractions blog
And bet they did. In 1991, Hawking and Kip Thorne bet Preskill that information that falls into a black hole gets destroyed and can never be retrieved. Called the black hole information paradox, this prospect follows from Hawking’s landmark 1974 discovery about black holes — regions of inescapable gravity, where space-time curves steeply toward a central point known as the singularity. Hawking had shown that black holes are not truly black. Quantum uncertainty causes them to radiate a small amount of heat, dubbed “Hawking radiation.” They lose mass in the process and ultimately evaporate away. This evaporation leads to a paradox: Anything that falls into a black hole will seemingly be lost forever, violating “unitarity” — a central principle of quantum mechanics that says the present always preserves information about the past.
Hawking and Thorne argued that the radiation emitted by a black hole would be too hopelessly scrambled to retrieve any useful information about what fell into it, even in principle. Preskill bet that information somehow escapes black holes, even though physicists would presumably need a complete theory of quantum gravity to understand the mechanism behind how this could happen.
Physicists thought they resolved the paradox in 2004 with the notion of black hole complementarity. According to this proposal, information that crosses the event horizon of a black hole both reflects back out and passes inside, never to escape. Because no single observer can ever be both inside and outside the black hole’s horizon, no one can witness both situations simultaneously, and no contradiction arises. The argument was sufficient to convince Hawking to concede the bet. During a July 2004 talk in Dublin, Ireland, he presented Preskill with the eighth edition of Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia, “from which information can be retrieved at will.”
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab
Thorne, however refused to concede, and it seems he was right to do so. In 2012, a new twist on the paradox emerged. Nobody had explained precisely how information would get out of a black hole, and that lack of a specific mechanism inspired Joseph Polchinski and three colleagues to revisit the problem. Conventional wisdom had long held that once someone passed the event horizon, they would slowly be pulled apart by the extreme gravity as they fell toward the singularity. Polchinski and his co-authors argued that instead, in-falling observers would encounter a literal wall of fire at the event horizon, burning up before ever getting near the singularity.
At the heart of the firewall puzzle lies a conflict between three fundamental postulates. The first is the equivalence principle of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: Because there’s no difference between acceleration due to gravity and the acceleration of a rocket, an astronaut named Alice shouldn’t feel anything amiss as she crosses a black hole horizon. The second is unitarity, which implies that information cannot be destroyed. Lastly, there’s locality, which holds that events happening at a particular point in space can only influence nearby points. This means that the laws of physics should work as expected far away from a black hole, even if they break down at some point within the black hole — either at the singularity or at the event horizon.
To resolve the paradox, one of the three postulates must be sacrificed, and nobody can agree on which one should get the axe. The simplest solution is to have the equivalence principle break down at the event horizon, thereby giving rise to a firewall. But several other possible solutions have been proposed in the ensuing years.