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Information Paradox- Can black holes delete the universe?



We have all know how black holes absorb everything in it. Even light is not sparred. But apart from this they have one more property- they could delete the universe itself. How? Let’s understand how.

INFORMATION:

Let’s first understand about the “information” I am talking about. It is not about some Roman history or other facts of encyclopedia. It’s the information about the matter in the universe. Everything in the universe is made of matter; how different atoms come together to form different structures to form different things. This is information. The different things may include various things ranging from one carbon compound (diamond or graphite) to squirrels to planets and stars in the universe. The structure of each of these things is called INFORMATION. The basic building block of everything in the universe is the same. Without this information everything would be the same.

But black holes eat up this information when they consume the stars and planets. And when the black holes disappear, it will take all this information with them. This will happen very slowly. Black hole radiates its mass like a hot water pot losing its water in the form of steam. It’ll take zillion zillion zillion years to lose 0.0000000001% of mass.

According to the theory of quantum mechanics, information is indestructible. It can change its form, but cannot be destroyed. Just like energy. It can be converted from one form to another but cannot be destroyed. So if you could trace every particle, radiation in the universe, you could track every information in the universe. Hypothetically, you could trace this information right back to the beginning of universe, to the Big Bang. 

So technically by studying every particle, we can differentiate between various structures in the universe. Black holes do the opposite of this. They consume the information and mix it up. In short, destroys the information. Now this statement creates INFORMATION PARADOX.

INFORMATION PARADOX:

According to laws of quantum mechanics, information can never be lost. Information paradox is a puzzling result of combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. General relativity suggests that information gets destroyed in the black hole. But this is controversial to quantum mechanics, thus leading to information paradox.

A fundamental postulate in quantum mechanics states that complete information is encoded in its wave function up to when the wave function collapses. Wave function implies that information is conserved in quantum sense. Whereas calculations suggest that information is completely destroyed inside a black hole.

Now this is rather confusing; whether the information is actually stored or destroyed! So let’s get into the postulated solutions for Information Paradox.

Postulated Solutions for Information Paradox:

  • INFORMATION IS LOST: It means that the information is lost irretrievably and forever. Whatever we have worked on like the physics laws and equations, will be lost and we have to start from scratch.
  • INFORMATION IS STORED IN BABY UNIVERSE: It means that the information is hidden. Maybe a part of black hole separates from black hole to form a baby universe, where part of information is stored. Technically the information is not lost but we cannot observe it as we cannot interact with this newly formed baby universe. It’s like having a broken hard drive; the information on it is not deleted but it cannot be accessed.
  • INFORMATION IS STORED IN SMALL REMNANT: It could be possible that information is stored in a very small part of a black hole (like a pixel).  And the capacity of this remnant will be large; large enough to store all the information till date.

There could be another possibility that the remnant which stores the information could expand its size to increase its storage capacity. Like for example, the black hole will absorb everything and store it, till it gets full. But when it has to add new information, it will expand slightly to store that information.

There are many theories to suggest information paradox and its solutions. Many argue that this can be solved by invoking issues of quantum theory which is often referred to as the "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics. Or maybe we got this all wrong in the first place. Maybe this is not how black holes store information!

We still don't have the right answer. Maybe we do. Scientists are still working to solve this paradox!

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