
Stephen Hawking's New Black-Hole Paper, Translated: An Interview - softdev12
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dark-star-diaries/stephen-hawking-s-new-black-hole-paper-translated-an-interview-with-co-author-andrew-strominger/
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mattlutze
This paragraph really nailed it for me:

 _" We show that when a charged particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the
black hole. So it adds hair to the black hole. And more generally if any
particle goes in—because all particles carry mass and are coupled to
gravity—they always add a soft graviton. So there’s a kind of recording
device. These soft photons and gravitons record information about what went
into the black hole—infinitely more information than we previously believed is
recorded by this mechanism. Now whether all information is recorded by this
mechanism… I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no, but there are
generalizations of this mechanism and then it’s a lot more confusing."_

They're showing in this model that perhaps, the event horizon of a black hold
acts like this kind of abacus, pushing the photons suspended at the edge of
the horizon a little bit in, a little bit out, recording what has fallen over
that horizon during the life of the black hole.

That's really, really cool.

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MikeNomad
Maybe a Black Hole destroys information, or perhaps it changes information to
a form that we can't (yet) recognize. Presently, both of those states would
look the same to us.

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kamilner
Did you have something specific in mind? Otherwise as I read your comment I
should mention the 'recognizability' of the information is irrelevant to the
paper. The paradox is about the differing predictions from general relativity
and quantum mechanics, one of which implies that the information is lost and
the other of which implies that the information is not (the form it takes is
not important).

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xyzzy4
My first question is, how much of this is provable, and how much is
conjecture?

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frozenport
You can simulate the equations [1] and debate if it matches observed objects.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00921v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.00921v1.pdf)

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ars
That would be tough since we've never actually observed an event horizon. We
don't know if they even exist.

The only observations we have are of supermassive objects. Do they have event
horizons? We assume so, but no one really knows.

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sohkamyung
We may get an answer to that in the future via the Event Horizon Telescope [1]
which plans to "directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole
with angular resolution comparable to the event horizon."

[1]
[http://eventhorizontelescope.org/index.html](http://eventhorizontelescope.org/index.html)

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martijn_himself
I find articles like this both incredibly interesting but perhaps even more
confusing.

It must be because the complex math underlying these findings can not
accurately be expressed in human language.

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mattlutze
The further down the theoretical rabbit hole you go, the more so even high-
level discussions probably need a general comfort with the field.

Discussion about these soft particles, zero-energy photons and gravitons,
being added to a vacuum changing its state out to infinity is pretty
fascinating. I would have liked him to explain a little more in-depth how one
of these particles could have no energy but still have a spin, though I
imagine that's left to the reader to go find the papers that define it.

