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It has always struck me as kind of bizarre that we make assertions about what is beyond the event horizon of a black hole at all. Since no information can esca

It has always struck me as kind of bizarre that we make assertions about what is beyond the event horizon of a black hole at all. Since no information can escape that place and reach us as evidence, all claims about it are unfalsifiable. For all we know the universe decides to save memory and just not render anything there at all.

evanb 3y ago
> Since no information can escape that place and reach us as evidence, all claims about it are unfalsifiable. The idea that no information can escape from the event horizon is model-dependent; it's a mathematical result from the assumptions of classic general relativity. If you operate with the assumption that the claim is true, it's fair to consider the other mathematical results of classic general relativity. That's why (some) people say there is a singularity. Of course, the point is that if GR isn't exactly but only approximately true to a deeper theory, is the claim about singularities also true in the deeper theory, or does the deeper theory resolve the singularities somehow? That deeper theory may also say that information escapes from the event horizon. For example, Hawking showed that semiclassical quantum corrections to GR means that black holes emit thermal (information-free) radiation. If we had a fully quantum theory of gravity people expect the evolution to be completely unitary and the information could ultimately be acquired (perhaps at enormous computational expense).
- XorNot 3y ago
  We also know GR is incomplete because it cannot explain what happens in a black hole at the singularity. Objects within have to always be approaching it but never reach it (since then they would not be approaching it) but it has a finite volume in space, so they must eventually get there.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Black holes have a finite volume on the outside, but I'd have to do an integral above my skill level to work out the volume inside; if I understand right, the radial direction and the time direction switch roles at the event horizon. Also, I'm not sure you need stuff to always approach without ever getting there: it's not clear what happens to quantum fields at a singularity, but if you no longer have time displacement symmetry you don't get energy conservation so stuff might just cease to exist.
    - nyssos 3y ago
      > but I'd have to do an integral above my skill level to work out the volume inside; if I understand right, the radial direction and the time direction switch roles at the event horizon. If you try to naively apply the same procedure you would use to define volumes outside the event horizon, it's proportional to the lifetime of the black hole (infinite in the classical case) for the reason you note. Of course the better way to interpret this is probably just that the interior volume of a black hole is ill-defined.
  - evanb 3y ago
    I think you're making an error---according to GR the singularities in black hole cores are in time, not locations in space, as confusing as that is, and as much as colloquial language suggests it. Every geodesic that crosses the horizon terminates at the singularity in a finite amount of time. If you fall past the horizon the singularity is in your definite future and in a finite amount of proper observer time your geodesic will end, at which point ... who knows what happens.
philipov 3y ago
The only reason we claim that no information can escape a black hole is because of a theory that makes assertions about what is beyond the event horizon. In other words, it's a claim that is only unfalsifiable... if it is true. If you reject the theory because it makes unfalsifiable claims, you no longer get to claim they are unfalsifiable.
- throwoutway 3y ago
  That's not science, that's making assertions and yelling 'fallacy!' at other people
  - philipov 3y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what using one of the outputs of a theory to claim it is unfalsifiable is like.
    - pantulis 3y ago
      We know that General Relativity breaks at the singularity which means the maths are wrong there, but to replace GR you have to: 1) solve the BH thingy and 2) be compatible with GR in the other scenarios. GR is not a "hypothesis", it's well established fact and has been verified to death. While we wait a more general theoretical model comes out (string theory? quantum loop gravity? who knows), working with the imperfect tools we have is the most sensible approach.
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        I mean we haven’t reconciled quantum & GR yet but we still use quantum for quantum scale things and GR for larger scale distances just fine. It’s not impossible to have a separate model for within the singularity that only applies within the singularity without having to unify it with GR. As long as there are falsifiable claims being made within the context of the new theory that can be tested somehow, that’s all that matters.
jerf 3y ago
"It has always struck me as kind of bizarre that we make assertions about what is beyond the event horizon of a black hole at all." Careful readers and writers will observe that we do not. What physicists actually say is "IF this theory is true, THEN we can say this and that about what lies within a black hole." Since at the moment we do not have any satisfactory theory that accurately describes black holes, every such if-then statement is known to be flawed, and a careful thinker will recognize these as being exploratory examinations of what theories imply, and a search for testable predictions, rather than dogmatic declarations of the true nature of the universe. Sometimes, for instance, you can explore a theory and determine that it makes contradictory predictions, which means you can toss that one out. Exploring mathematical hypotheses is a perfectly sensible use of research time. However, careless readers, writers, and thinkers abound. I think it is the general sense of physicists in general that there probably isn't a singularity in a black hole. There is almost certainly something there that is sensible under some theory. Extreme, sure, but sensible. It is relativity and derived theories that specifically yield singularities, but we also know relativity is not a complete description of the universe. Even this article, if read carefully, is not saying "black holes do not in the real universe have singularities". It is saying something much more like "Previously physicists have accepted that IF the mathematics of Einsteinian relativity is true, THEN black holes have singularities. However, if you analyze the mathematics more carefuly, this IF-THEN does not in fact follow from the mathematics." It actually isn't a claim about the real universe, which is already known to not be purely described by Einsteinian relativity, but a claim about Einsteinian relativity qua Einsteinian relativity as a mathematical theory. Of course, the whole reason anyone talks about singularities in black holes at all is precisely Einsteinian relativity in the first place. Quantum mechanics isn't the reason, nor any other alternate Theory of Everything that I know of. So if they are removed there, we are left with no reason to suspect singularities exist in any sense. That still doesn't mean that we positively know what goes on under the event horizon. It would merely eliminate one "IF relativity THEN singularity" from our current discussion. Still progress in its own important way, but perhaps not as groundbreaking as a popular press treatment might claim.
- corethree 3y ago
  First off no statement in science can be proven true. It's just the nature of what science is, even Einstein knew this. In science and therefore reality as we know it, things can only be falsified. I talked about this in this thread through other posts. Second, was general relativity falsified or are you referring to generally accepted speculation? If it was falsified, do you have a source?
timacles 3y ago
truly writing to /dev/null
NegativeK 3y ago
Mass, angular velocity, and charge information "escape" just fine. And given LIGO's recent successes, I'd assume they're able to make significant observations about the insides of black holes during ringdown.
- digging 3y ago
  Wait, why would LIGO be ale to detect anything about the inside of merging black holes? Mass, angular velocity, and charge are aggregate properties of the whole black hole and detectable, but information about matter that has entered the event horizon is still hidden from us even with gravitational wave detection. If LIGO is able to retrieve information from the insides of black holes that should be earth-shattering news, no?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
corethree 3y ago
You also realize that anything that is true is be definition unfalsifiable? That means even assertions made outside of the black hole that are true are not falsifiable. Also I'm sure you already know that we can't prove anything to be true either in science and therefore reality, so basically the universe outside of the black hole is full of falsified statements and unprovable statements... and we just assert that some of those unprovable statements are true. For example: general relativity. "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." -albert Einstein So basically what you said applies to things everywhere not just in black holes. Likely you meant that everything inside the black hole is just not observable. Sorry for being pedantic.
Maro 3y ago
This is not entirely true. We can imagine a civilization made up for very sturdy physicists, so tidal forces inside the black hole don't rip them apart immediately. This civilization can enter the event horizon of the black hole, and observe what happens inside, make measurements, new theories, write papers, upload them to pre-prints, go to conferences, etc. It is true that they cannot communicate with the outside world, but that may not bother them if there's enough of them that they can share their new discoveries with each other and have a society and satisfy their intellectual curiosity. According to classical general relativity there are no stable orbits inside the black hole, so eventually this society will get arbitrary close to the singularity (or, to extremely large curvatures), so eventually they all would die, irrespective of how sturdy they are. But this is also true outside the black hole, per our current best theories, we will all either get crushed in a big crunch (reverse of the big bang), or heat death as the Universe expands indefinitely. (Or, sooner, when the sun explodes, or sooner if an asteroid hits us, or global warming, or we nuke each other..)
- corethree 3y ago
  The weird thing about this is that according to the theory... nothing ever enters the black hole. Everything freezes at the event horizon because time slows down and eventually gets frozen at the horizon. This is what happens relative to the outside observer. The person entering the black hole does not perceive time freezing. How could he? Relative to himself he will enter the black hole but for him time outside of the black hole will accelerate at infinite speed well past the heat death of the universe forever in an instant. Then once the universe ends if there is an end, he will cross the threshold and move through the event horizon.
  - Maro 3y ago
    No, this is false: "nothing ever enters the black hole". For the outside observer, it seems like nothing enters the event horizon. It seems like everything just gets infinitely close and redshifts and expands, and forms a giant low-energy redshifted enveloping pancake around the black hole. But, from the perspective of the object passing through the event horizon, none of this happens, she passes through just fine. Yes, relativity theory is weird as hell.
floxy 3y ago
I have no idea about this, but it would certainly be interesting if someone were to perform simulations for a black hole merger using both the ring singularity and this torus-of-mass distribution, and see if there are any differences in the gravitational waves.
lamontcg 3y ago
The theory of what happens inside a black hole can have implications for what happens at the event horizon of a black hole and what happens outside of the event horizon, which could be testable. It does require the assumption that physics is consistent and that it isn't "Calvinball" with one set of rules outside and a complete different set of rules inside, but that seems reasonable.
az09mugen 3y ago
As if black holes are 'write only' memory. Good analogy
fizx 3y ago
There are more ways to know things than observation.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Are they significantly different from the way that I know that Harry Potter is a wizard? Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in hearing about some maximally elegant mathematical model which is consistent with the observations and the laws of physics on our side of the horizon. I just don't think I would then proceed to believe that what they described was a reality on the other side of that horizon.
  - SkyBelow 3y ago
    >I just don't think I would then proceed to believe that what they described was a reality on the other side of that horizon. Does the physicist believe that? If we get past popular culture which mangles modern science, the physicists are throwing around lots of random "what if" ideas and seeing where they go. If one is good, their idea is popular enough other physicists spend time thinking about if. If one gets lucky, then someone comes up with a way to test the theory (using the layman version of theory). If one gets REALLY lucky, the test doesn't lead to it being rejected. Sometimes there an be a long gap between when a physicist first thinks of a theory and someone finds a way to test it. Some ideas are still untestable, but may be interesting enough that physicists will still try to dive deeper and see where the idea goes. But do they believe it is the truth? While some might, I think most keep a sort "what if, maybe" vibe, even on the theories they spend time looking into. They are invested, but that doesn't mean the believe it is the truth, only that it is the model worth spending their time investigating. One key idea to consider, science does not give truth, it gives the model that best fits all known data without any claim to if that model is true or false.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    I understand why you say this but it sounds awfully pessimistic. Its still an area of active theoretical research, we really don't know that there is no way to get information from a black hole, as I understand it from the black hole information paradox[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
pontus 3y ago
I mean, you could jump into the black hole to see what's inside so it's not unfalsifiable. The only issue is that you can't convey it to someone on the outside of the black hole.
lmm 3y ago
Information about the future can never reach us in the present, yet we tend to assume that the rules of physics will be the same in the future and make predictions about it. The inside of a black hole is inaccecsible in exactly the same way.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  > Information about the future can never reach us in the present Sure it can, you just have to be patient.
- deely3 3y ago
  Is prediction differs from information about future? Do we have some ideas why rules of physics will be different in the future?
  - lmm 3y ago
    > Is prediction differs from information about future? Yes, prediction doesn't and can't contain information (in the technical sense) from the future, since by definition it's based only on what we know in the present. > Do we have some ideas why rules of physics will be different in the future? No. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that the rules of physics will be the same in the future. Just as it's perfectly reasonable to assume that they're the same inside a black hole. But in both cases we can't know.
    - sssilver 3y ago
      > prediction doesn't and can't contain information (in the technical sense) from the future, since by definition it's based only on what we know in the present In the technical sense the future _is_ driven purely by the information available in the present. It’s a function of t-1. The only reason future should be different from prediction is if the set of information available to the predictor about the present is different from the actual set of information about the present.
      - 3y ago
kromem 3y ago
One of the newer theories around the information paradox is that the information 'lost' is actually encoded in the Hawking radiation released, and with the proper key to decode it one could theoretically peer inside the black hole. My sense is that we've got it flipped, and have so strongly embraced the 'realism' of quanta that we intuitively reject some of the more continuous features of GR, whereas if I was putting forward the candidate for the secondary 'rendering' side effect, it would be the conversation of continuous modeled things to discrete units for tracking state from interactions with free agents so optimized that erasing persistent information about the interactions converts back from discrete to continuous. We've now seen that paradigm with procedural generated environments with deformable geometry where continuous seed functions convert to voxels that are tracked. Maybe the foundation of existence is continuous and infinitely scaled, and it's only our own emulation of that foundation where there's conversion to discrete units and fundamental limits preventing any 'real' infinites?
- eigenket 3y ago
  > and with the proper key to decode it one could theoretically peer inside the black hole I've never seen anything asserting this, and this is not what standard theories say. The idea is that with the right "key" you can recover the information that was encoded in the stuff that fell into the black hole. As far as I know there is no suggestion this gives you any information about what is going on inside it.
  - kromem 3y ago
    Ah, then you might enjoy one of the more fun reads I had this past year: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-calculations-show-how-to-escape-hawkings-black-hole-paradox-20230802/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-calculations-show-how-to-... I wouldn't put money on it being the case, but it's definitely "outside the event horizon" thinking and worth a read.
    - eigenket 3y ago
      That is indeed a fun read, but nothing in it contradicts what I said.

evanb 3y ago

> Since no information can escape that place and reach us as evidence, all claims about it are unfalsifiable. The idea that no information can escape from the event horizon is model-dependent; it's a mathematical result from the assumptions of classic general relativity. If you operate with the assumption that the claim is true, it's fair to consider the other mathematical results of classic general relativity. That's why (some) people say there is a singularity. Of course, the point is that if GR isn't exactly but only approximately true to a deeper theory, is the claim about singularities also true in the deeper theory, or does the deeper theory resolve the singularities somehow? That deeper theory may also say that information escapes from the event horizon. For example, Hawking showed that semiclassical quantum corrections to GR means that black holes emit thermal (information-free) radiation. If we had a fully quantum theory of gravity people expect the evolution to be completely unitary and the information could ultimately be acquired (perhaps at enormous computational expense).

XorNot 3y ago
We also know GR is incomplete because it cannot explain what happens in a black hole at the singularity. Objects within have to always be approaching it but never reach it (since then they would not be approaching it) but it has a finite volume in space, so they must eventually get there.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Black holes have a finite volume on the outside, but I'd have to do an integral above my skill level to work out the volume inside; if I understand right, the radial direction and the time direction switch roles at the event horizon. Also, I'm not sure you need stuff to always approach without ever getting there: it's not clear what happens to quantum fields at a singularity, but if you no longer have time displacement symmetry you don't get energy conservation so stuff might just cease to exist.
  - nyssos 3y ago
    > but I'd have to do an integral above my skill level to work out the volume inside; if I understand right, the radial direction and the time direction switch roles at the event horizon. If you try to naively apply the same procedure you would use to define volumes outside the event horizon, it's proportional to the lifetime of the black hole (infinite in the classical case) for the reason you note. Of course the better way to interpret this is probably just that the interior volume of a black hole is ill-defined.
- evanb 3y ago
  I think you're making an error---according to GR the singularities in black hole cores are in time, not locations in space, as confusing as that is, and as much as colloquial language suggests it. Every geodesic that crosses the horizon terminates at the singularity in a finite amount of time. If you fall past the horizon the singularity is in your definite future and in a finite amount of proper observer time your geodesic will end, at which point ... who knows what happens.

philipov 3y ago

The only reason we claim that no information can escape a black hole is because of a theory that makes assertions about what is beyond the event horizon. In other words, it's a claim that is only unfalsifiable... if it is true. If you reject the theory because it makes unfalsifiable claims, you no longer get to claim they are unfalsifiable.

throwoutway 3y ago
That's not science, that's making assertions and yelling 'fallacy!' at other people
- philipov 3y ago
  Yes, that's exactly what using one of the outputs of a theory to claim it is unfalsifiable is like.
  - pantulis 3y ago
    We know that General Relativity breaks at the singularity which means the maths are wrong there, but to replace GR you have to: 1) solve the BH thingy and 2) be compatible with GR in the other scenarios. GR is not a "hypothesis", it's well established fact and has been verified to death. While we wait a more general theoretical model comes out (string theory? quantum loop gravity? who knows), working with the imperfect tools we have is the most sensible approach.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      I mean we haven’t reconciled quantum & GR yet but we still use quantum for quantum scale things and GR for larger scale distances just fine. It’s not impossible to have a separate model for within the singularity that only applies within the singularity without having to unify it with GR. As long as there are falsifiable claims being made within the context of the new theory that can be tested somehow, that’s all that matters.

jerf 3y ago

"It has always struck me as kind of bizarre that we make assertions about what is beyond the event horizon of a black hole at all." Careful readers and writers will observe that we do not. What physicists actually say is "IF this theory is true, THEN we can say this and that about what lies within a black hole." Since at the moment we do not have any satisfactory theory that accurately describes black holes, every such if-then statement is known to be flawed, and a careful thinker will recognize these as being exploratory examinations of what theories imply, and a search for testable predictions, rather than dogmatic declarations of the true nature of the universe. Sometimes, for instance, you can explore a theory and determine that it makes contradictory predictions, which means you can toss that one out. Exploring mathematical hypotheses is a perfectly sensible use of research time. However, careless readers, writers, and thinkers abound. I think it is the general sense of physicists in general that there probably isn't a singularity in a black hole. There is almost certainly something there that is sensible under some theory. Extreme, sure, but sensible. It is relativity and derived theories that specifically yield singularities, but we also know relativity is not a complete description of the universe. Even this article, if read carefully, is not saying "black holes do not in the real universe have singularities". It is saying something much more like "Previously physicists have accepted that IF the mathematics of Einsteinian relativity is true, THEN black holes have singularities. However, if you analyze the mathematics more carefuly, this IF-THEN does not in fact follow from the mathematics." It actually isn't a claim about the real universe, which is already known to not be purely described by Einsteinian relativity, but a claim about Einsteinian relativity qua Einsteinian relativity as a mathematical theory. Of course, the whole reason anyone talks about singularities in black holes at all is precisely Einsteinian relativity in the first place. Quantum mechanics isn't the reason, nor any other alternate Theory of Everything that I know of. So if they are removed there, we are left with no reason to suspect singularities exist in any sense. That still doesn't mean that we positively know what goes on under the event horizon. It would merely eliminate one "IF relativity THEN singularity" from our current discussion. Still progress in its own important way, but perhaps not as groundbreaking as a popular press treatment might claim.

corethree 3y ago
First off no statement in science can be proven true. It's just the nature of what science is, even Einstein knew this. In science and therefore reality as we know it, things can only be falsified. I talked about this in this thread through other posts. Second, was general relativity falsified or are you referring to generally accepted speculation? If it was falsified, do you have a source?

timacles 3y ago

truly writing to /dev/null

NegativeK 3y ago

Mass, angular velocity, and charge information "escape" just fine. And given LIGO's recent successes, I'd assume they're able to make significant observations about the insides of black holes during ringdown.

digging 3y ago
Wait, why would LIGO be ale to detect anything about the inside of merging black holes? Mass, angular velocity, and charge are aggregate properties of the whole black hole and detectable, but information about matter that has entered the event horizon is still hidden from us even with gravitational wave detection. If LIGO is able to retrieve information from the insides of black holes that should be earth-shattering news, no?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

corethree 3y ago

You also realize that anything that is true is be definition unfalsifiable? That means even assertions made outside of the black hole that are true are not falsifiable. Also I'm sure you already know that we can't prove anything to be true either in science and therefore reality, so basically the universe outside of the black hole is full of falsified statements and unprovable statements... and we just assert that some of those unprovable statements are true. For example: general relativity. "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." -albert Einstein So basically what you said applies to things everywhere not just in black holes. Likely you meant that everything inside the black hole is just not observable. Sorry for being pedantic.

Maro 3y ago

This is not entirely true. We can imagine a civilization made up for very sturdy physicists, so tidal forces inside the black hole don't rip them apart immediately. This civilization can enter the event horizon of the black hole, and observe what happens inside, make measurements, new theories, write papers, upload them to pre-prints, go to conferences, etc. It is true that they cannot communicate with the outside world, but that may not bother them if there's enough of them that they can share their new discoveries with each other and have a society and satisfy their intellectual curiosity. According to classical general relativity there are no stable orbits inside the black hole, so eventually this society will get arbitrary close to the singularity (or, to extremely large curvatures), so eventually they all would die, irrespective of how sturdy they are. But this is also true outside the black hole, per our current best theories, we will all either get crushed in a big crunch (reverse of the big bang), or heat death as the Universe expands indefinitely. (Or, sooner, when the sun explodes, or sooner if an asteroid hits us, or global warming, or we nuke each other..)

corethree 3y ago
The weird thing about this is that according to the theory... nothing ever enters the black hole. Everything freezes at the event horizon because time slows down and eventually gets frozen at the horizon. This is what happens relative to the outside observer. The person entering the black hole does not perceive time freezing. How could he? Relative to himself he will enter the black hole but for him time outside of the black hole will accelerate at infinite speed well past the heat death of the universe forever in an instant. Then once the universe ends if there is an end, he will cross the threshold and move through the event horizon.
- Maro 3y ago
  No, this is false: "nothing ever enters the black hole". For the outside observer, it seems like nothing enters the event horizon. It seems like everything just gets infinitely close and redshifts and expands, and forms a giant low-energy redshifted enveloping pancake around the black hole. But, from the perspective of the object passing through the event horizon, none of this happens, she passes through just fine. Yes, relativity theory is weird as hell.

floxy 3y ago

I have no idea about this, but it would certainly be interesting if someone were to perform simulations for a black hole merger using both the ring singularity and this torus-of-mass distribution, and see if there are any differences in the gravitational waves.

lamontcg 3y ago

The theory of what happens inside a black hole can have implications for what happens at the event horizon of a black hole and what happens outside of the event horizon, which could be testable. It does require the assumption that physics is consistent and that it isn't "Calvinball" with one set of rules outside and a complete different set of rules inside, but that seems reasonable.

az09mugen 3y ago

As if black holes are 'write only' memory. Good analogy

fizx 3y ago

There are more ways to know things than observation.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Are they significantly different from the way that I know that Harry Potter is a wizard? Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in hearing about some maximally elegant mathematical model which is consistent with the observations and the laws of physics on our side of the horizon. I just don't think I would then proceed to believe that what they described was a reality on the other side of that horizon.
- SkyBelow 3y ago
  >I just don't think I would then proceed to believe that what they described was a reality on the other side of that horizon. Does the physicist believe that? If we get past popular culture which mangles modern science, the physicists are throwing around lots of random "what if" ideas and seeing where they go. If one is good, their idea is popular enough other physicists spend time thinking about if. If one gets lucky, then someone comes up with a way to test the theory (using the layman version of theory). If one gets REALLY lucky, the test doesn't lead to it being rejected. Sometimes there an be a long gap between when a physicist first thinks of a theory and someone finds a way to test it. Some ideas are still untestable, but may be interesting enough that physicists will still try to dive deeper and see where the idea goes. But do they believe it is the truth? While some might, I think most keep a sort "what if, maybe" vibe, even on the theories they spend time looking into. They are invested, but that doesn't mean the believe it is the truth, only that it is the model worth spending their time investigating. One key idea to consider, science does not give truth, it gives the model that best fits all known data without any claim to if that model is true or false.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  I understand why you say this but it sounds awfully pessimistic. Its still an area of active theoretical research, we really don't know that there is no way to get information from a black hole, as I understand it from the black hole information paradox[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox

pontus 3y ago

I mean, you could jump into the black hole to see what's inside so it's not unfalsifiable. The only issue is that you can't convey it to someone on the outside of the black hole.

lmm 3y ago

Information about the future can never reach us in the present, yet we tend to assume that the rules of physics will be the same in the future and make predictions about it. The inside of a black hole is inaccecsible in exactly the same way.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
> Information about the future can never reach us in the present Sure it can, you just have to be patient.
deely3 3y ago
Is prediction differs from information about future? Do we have some ideas why rules of physics will be different in the future?
- lmm 3y ago
  > Is prediction differs from information about future? Yes, prediction doesn't and can't contain information (in the technical sense) from the future, since by definition it's based only on what we know in the present. > Do we have some ideas why rules of physics will be different in the future? No. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that the rules of physics will be the same in the future. Just as it's perfectly reasonable to assume that they're the same inside a black hole. But in both cases we can't know.
  - sssilver 3y ago
    > prediction doesn't and can't contain information (in the technical sense) from the future, since by definition it's based only on what we know in the present In the technical sense the future _is_ driven purely by the information available in the present. It’s a function of t-1. The only reason future should be different from prediction is if the set of information available to the predictor about the present is different from the actual set of information about the present.
    - 3y ago

kromem 3y ago

One of the newer theories around the information paradox is that the information 'lost' is actually encoded in the Hawking radiation released, and with the proper key to decode it one could theoretically peer inside the black hole. My sense is that we've got it flipped, and have so strongly embraced the 'realism' of quanta that we intuitively reject some of the more continuous features of GR, whereas if I was putting forward the candidate for the secondary 'rendering' side effect, it would be the conversation of continuous modeled things to discrete units for tracking state from interactions with free agents so optimized that erasing persistent information about the interactions converts back from discrete to continuous. We've now seen that paradigm with procedural generated environments with deformable geometry where continuous seed functions convert to voxels that are tracked. Maybe the foundation of existence is continuous and infinitely scaled, and it's only our own emulation of that foundation where there's conversion to discrete units and fundamental limits preventing any 'real' infinites?

eigenket 3y ago
> and with the proper key to decode it one could theoretically peer inside the black hole I've never seen anything asserting this, and this is not what standard theories say. The idea is that with the right "key" you can recover the information that was encoded in the stuff that fell into the black hole. As far as I know there is no suggestion this gives you any information about what is going on inside it.
- kromem 3y ago
  Ah, then you might enjoy one of the more fun reads I had this past year: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-calculations-show-how-to-escape-hawkings-black-hole-paradox-20230802/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-calculations-show-how-to-... I wouldn't put money on it being the case, but it's definitely "outside the event horizon" thinking and worth a read.
  - eigenket 3y ago
    That is indeed a fun read, but nothing in it contradicts what I said.