Information can be lost in Black Holes from "summary" of A Brief History of Time by Stephen W. Hawking
In the early 1970s, the concept of black holes began to pose a significant problem for physicists. According to classical physics, once something falls into a black hole, it can never escape. This raised a crucial question: what happens to the information about the object that fell into the black hole? One possibility was that the information was destroyed, never to be retrieved. This idea was troubling because it violated a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics: information is always conserved. In other words, the information about a system at one time should determine its state at any future time. To tackle this problem, physicists proposed the idea of "Hawking radiation." According to this concept, black holes are not truly black but emit a small amount of radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon. Over time, this radiation causes the black hole to lose mass and eventually evaporate completely. However, the key question remained: what happens to the information of the objects that fell into the black hole during this process? One possibility was that the information was encoded in the radiation emitted by the black hole and could, in theory, be retrieved. This idea led to the "information paradox," which highlighted the contradiction between the principles of quantum mechanics and general relativity. While quantum mechanics demands that information is never lost, general relativity implies that information can be destroyed in a black hole. The resolution of this paradox remains a topic of active research in theoretical physics. Some theorists have proposed that information is somehow encoded in the Hawking radiation, while others suggest more radical solutions, such as modifications to the laws of physics near the event horizon of a black hole.- The fate of information in black holes represents a fundamental challenge to our understanding of the universe. As physicists continue to explore the mysteries of black holes, they may uncover new insights that shed light on this perplexing issue.
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