MSU Professor Chris Adami has found the solution to a long-standing problem with Stephen Hawking’s black hole theory.
In a groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity,
Adami found that various types of information, as specific as matter or particles, or as obscure as the contacts in your mobile phone or the contents of a secret diary, never disappear in the black hole to begin with, effectively solving the black hole information paradox of Hawking’s theory.
In 1975, Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t all black. They actually radiate a glow called Hawking Radiation. However, because the radiation slowly consumes the black hole and it eventually evaporates, Hawking concluded that anything that enters the black would be irretrievably lost.
Ever since Hawking introduced this theory, physicists across the globe, including Adami, were troubled with this information paradox.
“Hawking proposed that information disappears and what’s left is radiation,” Adami said. “But according to the laws of physics, information can’t disappear. Physicists concluded that either something is wrong with Hawking’s theory or something is wrong with our laws of nature. This has kept physicists up at night for decades.
“A loss of information would imply that the universe itself would suddenly become unpredictable every time the black hole swallows a particle,” Adami said. “That is just inconceivable. No law of physics that we know allows this to happen.”
The information, according to Adami, is contained in the stimulated emission of radiation, which must accompany the Hawking radiation.
“Stimulated emission is the physical process behind lasers. Basically, it works like a copy machine: you throw something into the machine, and two identical somethings come out.
“If you throw information at a black hole, just before it is swallowed, the black hole first makes a copy that is left outside. This copying mechanism was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1917 and without it, physics cannot be consistent,” Adami said.
So do others agree with Adami’s findings?
According to Paul Davies, cosmologist, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, "In my view Chris Adami has correctly identified the solution to the so-called black hole information paradox. Ironically, it has been hiding in plain sight for years. Hawking's famous black hole radiation is an example of so-called spontaneous emission of radiation, but it is only part of the story. There must also be the possibility of stimulated emission - the process that puts the S in LASER. “
With so many researchers trying to fix Hawking’s theory, why did it take so long?
“While a few people did realize that the stimulated emission effect was missing in Hawking's calculation, they could not resolve the paradox without a deep understanding of quantum communication theory,” Adami said. Quantum communication theory was designed to understand how information interacts with quantum systems, and Adami was one of the pioneers of quantum information theory back in the ‘90s.
So where does this leave us?
“All is well with black holes, and physics is not in crisis any more,” Adami said. “Stephen Hawking’s wonderful theory is now complete, the hole in the black hole theory is plugged, and I can now sleep at night.”
The study was co-authored by Greg Ver Steeg, University of Southern California.