this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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To oversimplify, "information" is a very specific thing in quantum physics. Classical physics has the rule that energy can change form but cannot either be created or destroyed.
Information works the same way in quantum physics, which makes black holes seem like a problem since their event horizons are inescapable and anything that falls inside is lost.
why's it a problem? why can't information just be lost at a black hole?
The problem is that it'd be like if matter and energy could just disappear. Black holes would be exclusively tiny, as soon as one formed it'd start vanishing anything that crossed it's event horizon rather than growing, so galaxies could never have formed as their cores would just shrink away as soon as they got too dense.
Black holes are regions of space where information density hits the upper limits allowed by physics. Add more information to it, and the event horizon expands proportionally to what was added. With that in hindsight, it seems rather obvious that the boundary of the event horizon could encode the information once thought to be lost to the black hole inside.
It could do that but what's the evidence that it does? Or has someone proved this is already a feature of semi-classical gravity that just wasn't noticed before? Or is it only a feature of a brand new hypothetical theory?
How deep do you want to go into this, and what's your level of familiarity with the Holographic Principal and AdS/CFT corrospondance? There's no hard evidence yet but there is a shitton of circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is what happens.