February 06, 2007

black hole information paradox

Steven Hawking tried to destroy the universe by making Black holes destroy Physical information!

This put us all at tremendous risk and is generally considered by Quantum mechanics to be an evil act.

Good thing Mr. Hawking made a great comback and saved the universe:
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

Whew! that was a close one!

3 comments:

shoo said...

The simplistic clarity of his explanation shows why he is one of the great scientific minds of our time.

Tina said...

Okay, before I clicked the dialog box that allows me to see & leave comments on blogger, all I saw of your comment above was "The simp"

Wow - I thought calling a great scientific mind a simp was pretty nervy. Not that YOUR mind isn't great, but still...

But then the whole thing loaded and nevermind!

- Rob said...

Tina - You had the right impression. You don't think that Shoo purposely setup his comment so that you saw "the simp" first and got that impression? He is more clever and subtle than you can imagine.

Plato? Socrates? Morons compared to Shoo!