Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Hawking pushes soft hair on black holes

A NY Times article brags about the latest research paper from Stephen Hawking and coauthors:
But there was a hitch. By Dr. Hawking’s estimation, the radiation coming out of the black hole as it fell apart would be random. As a result, most of the “information” about what had fallen in — all of the attributes and properties of the things sucked in, whether elephants or donkeys, Volkswagens or Cadillacs — would be erased.

In a riposte to Einstein’s famous remark that God does not play dice, Dr. Hawking said in 1976, “God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

But his calculation violated a tenet of modern physics: that it is always possible in theory to reverse time, run the proverbial film backward and reconstruct what happened in, say, the collision of two cars or the collapse of a dead star into a black hole.

The universe, like a kind of supercomputer, is supposed to be able to keep track of whether one car was a green pickup truck and the other was a red Porsche, or whether one was made of matter and the other antimatter. These things may be destroyed, but their “information” — their essential physical attributes — should live forever.
No, this is nonsense. There is no accepted principle that information should live forever.
At least in principle, then, he agreed, information is always preserved — even in the smoke and ashes when you, say, burn a book. With the right calculations, you should be able reconstruct the patterns of ink, the text. ...

But neither Dr. Hawking nor anybody else was able to come up with a convincing explanation for how that happens and how all this “information” escapes from the deadly erasing clutches of a black hole.

Indeed, a group of physicists four years ago tried to figure it out and suggested controversially that there might be a firewall of energy just inside a black hole that stops anything from getting out or even into a black hole.

The new results do not address that issue. But they do undermine the famous notion that black holes have “no hair” — that they are shorn of the essential properties of the things they have consumed. ...

But neither Dr. Hawking nor anybody else was able to come up with a convincing explanation for how that happens and how all this “information” escapes from the deadly erasing clutches of a black hole.

Indeed, a group of physicists four years ago tried to figure it out and suggested controversially that there might be a firewall of energy just inside a black hole that stops anything from getting out or even into a black hole.

The new results do not address that issue. But they do undermine the famous notion that black holes have “no hair” — that they are shorn of the essential properties of the things they have consumed. ...

“When I wrote my paper 40 years ago, I thought the information would pass into another universe,” he told me. Now he thinks the information is stored on the black hole’s horizon.
The general public must think that Hawking and other physicists are trolling us.

No, you cannot recconstruct a book after burning it, and you cannot recover info after dropping it into a black hole. Saying that the info stays on the horizon, or whatever Hawking is saying now, has no observable implications. The firewall idea is just more lunacy.

The idea that info lasts forever is promoted primarily the Everett many-worlds cult. They believe that irreversible experiments, like buring a book, are really just some sort of illusion, with all the info passing into a parallel universe. The info looks as if it is lost to our universe, but a trace of it is quantum entangled, so there is some infinitesimal probability it can be reinstated.

If that seems like gibberish to you, it is gibberish.

3 comments:

  1. They are trolling the taxpayer!

    Brian Rotman reviewing Max Tegmark's work:

    "Perhaps physicists really do understand themselves to be part of a giant mathematical object. For them Tegmark’s conclusion that we are living inside a Platonic, Level IV all-encompassing mathematical multiverse will be appealing: the ultimate guarantor and resting place of their quest for a theory of everything. (After all, physics excludes, in principle, anything in physical reality not measurable or describable in mathematical language, so what other ultimate truth can it think.) But as a mathematician, convinced that mathematics is a human construction, that numbers don’t exist in the world before embodied human psyches put them there, I don’t buy it. And the claim that our minds are ultimately self-aware mathemes – insofar as that assertion makes sense — seems like saying that Shakespeare’s plays are ultimately patterns of words: it tells you next to nothing about its object."

    If you want to be reduced to laughter, just take a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on holes.

    Rotman's review of Holes and Other Superficialities by Casati and Varzi:

    "Another tack, more relevant here, lies in analytic philosophy's kow-towing to science and (to what it takes to be) its ideals--conceptual exactitude, terminological precision, formalization, value-neutral language, and tropism to mathematics. The result is that more and more analytic philosophy resembles a weirdly specialized form of proto-science--one that manages to secure the worst of all worlds: neutral prose and formalist orientation, but with none of the flair and rigorous discipline of mathematical proof or the experimentation; the result is a vanilla mathesis whose highest impulse is to classify, clarify and disambiguate. And the same scientization captures analytic philosophy's engagement with such fundaments as existence, identity, meaning, knowledge, thinking, and the like. Here, too, a depersonalized, objective rationalism operates and achieves its cool by systematically occluding anything outside its own clear and transparent language--which includes almost everything most of us might find relevant, provoking or usable."

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  2. You don't even really have to burn a book to see how ridiculous the whole 'information is preserved' argument really is. Try this example instead, give a small child one hundred blocks to play with, and ask them to build something. When they are done, take a picture. Let another child play with the same blocks as left by the previous child. take a picture. Now repeat this process a few more times. After the last child has played and the picture been taken, gather the blocks into a pile. Now, call in Tegmark, Hawkings, the rest of the king's horses and all the king's men, and ask them if they can determine how much information has been lost since the blocks were first played with by the first child in the experiment. Do not allow them to know about or see the pictures taken. See if a single one of these quacks can determine a previous state of the blocks, or determine how many times the blocks were rearranged by the undisclosed number of children who played with them since the beginning of the experiment. As all of them to give their best guess what pattern or form the blocks were in.

    If the vaunted witch doctors can not determine, or have the means to determine the positioning of a mere 100 children's blocks, or have a method by which to determine how many different structures they were once a part of, why are they screwing with theoretical black holes, which they can not actually observe or measure in any way and make claims about how information is or is not lost? If you can not determine the information held by the blocks in their previous arrangement (information), or how many patterns they were involved in (information), how would/could one even make a statement about how much information was contained or lost from a mere pile of 100 blocks right in front of them? What makes an over paid pin head think they can determine if information has been lost or not in an imaginary construct they have never actually observed billions of light years away?

    The emperor has no clothes, and no clue.

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    Replies
    1. There is no such thing as "information" to begin with.

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