Speaking at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking announced that he may solved the Information Paradox with a new theory that explains how information can escape a black hole, reports New Scientist.
The Information Paradox is the result of two competing theories — one from quantum mechanics and one from general relativity — about the state of an object’s physical information when it encounters a black hole. Quantum mechanics predicts that the information remains intact within a black hole, while the relativity model suggests the information is destroyed due to the immense gravitational forces within a black hole. After more than four decades of debate, Hawking now proposes a third possibility in which the information remains intact because it does not enter into the black hole, but is destroyed as part of the journey.
“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” Hawking said.
According to Hawking’s theory, the information about particles that enter a black hole is stored on the surface event horizon in the form of holograms. Hawking argues that these holograms “contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.” These particles may eventually escape the black hole, according to the principles of Hawking Radiation, which describes a way in which photons are released from a black hole as the result of random quantum fluctuations. These escaping photons pick up the physical information stored on the event horizon, but this information is returned in a useless form. This outcome, where information is stored, but also irretrievable, reconciles both sides of the Information Paradox.
His new theory is that Hawking radiation can pick up some of the information stored on the event horizon as it is emitted, providing a way for it to get out. But don’t expect to get a message from within, he said. “The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost.”
Hawking described his theory at Tuesday’s Hawking Radiation Conference with a follow-up lecture by Cambridge Theoretical Physics Professor Malcolm Perry scheduled for Wednesday. Perry will provide additional details on this new theory with a paper from the pair expected to be released next month.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.