By Chethana Janith, Jadetimes News
Stephen Hawking would be so proud.
For 50 years, physicists have been toiling with ways to solve the “black hole information paradox” - the idea that black holes seem to destroy information, even thought that is an impossibility according the quantum field theory.
Because nothing can be measured beyond an event horizon, solving this mystery is difficult, but a new paper suggests that “entanglement islands” could extend beyond the event horizon far enough to be studied.
However, that’s easier said than done. These black holes are thousands of light years away, and there’s still the whole “overcoming immense gravity” thing.
The key to understanding our universe lies in two theories—one of the generally-very-big and one of the generally-very-small. Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity explains things like gravity and time, while Quantum Field Theory explores the subatomic world. However, one celestial object frustrates astrophysicists and quantum theorists in equal measure: black holes.
Because black holes release Hawking radiation (named for famous physicist Stephen Hawking), they eventually evaporate, which seemingly destroys the information that fell into the black hole. However, quantum field theory states that information cannot be destroyed. Result? Paradox.
For 50 years, scientists have wrestled with this question in the attempt to form the long sought-after Grand Unified Theory. There have been several possible solutions posited over the years, but possible solutions only create more questions, and the only way to test those solutions is to measure them. And that’s impossible, since nothing escapes a black hole’s event horizon. Or so we thought.
For years, scientists have theorized that some information from a black hole may be detectable beyond this all-consuming event horizon, thanks to what’s known as “entanglement islands.” However, because these “islands” are infinitesimally small, they’d be impossible to measure. But new research from astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley shows that in complicated black holes, like the ones found in our universe, these “islands” could be as much as one atom thick. And that would make them measurable. The results of this study are currently posted on the server arXiv, and have yet to be peer-reviewed.
“We show these islands actually protrude beyond the horizon of the black hole far enough that, in principle, there is no obstruction to probing them and coming back out,” study co-author UC Berkeley scientist Raphael Bousso told New Scientist. “That’s actually pretty dramatic because it means that there’s some extremely surprising and radical new physics that is no longer hidden behind black hole horizons or hits you when you try to jump into a black hole, but which is, in principle, accessible to us.”
But the simple fact that you could technically measure something doesn’t mean humans will actually be able to do it any time soon. Black holes with potential “islands” exist thousands of light years away, and getting close enough to one, with all its crushing gravity, would be a monumental task. An electrically charged black hole would help, as a negatively charged spacecraft could get a magnetized assist from the black hole for the return trip, but all these scenarios are firmly within the realm of science fiction… at least for now.
However, scientists don’t necessarily need to travel to deep space to put this data-gathering mission into action. Microscopic black holes can be formed in laboratories on Earth, and future quantum computers could potentially simulate them (though that’s still a long way off).
For now, the good news is that black holes may not be the complete void of information we thought they were. Whether or not we’ll ever be able to retrieving that information, however, remains to be seen.
