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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 prop

by 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.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      You made a malformed statement, implying that time and events continue on, like nothing is wrong and the only difference is we can't see it. But space and time switch places inside a black hole. All directions lead toward the singularity, where as in our world, all directions lead toward the future. The units are incompatible between the two worlds.
      - eigenket 3y ago
        Could you perhaps quote exactly what statement I made which is malformed? In any case the picture of time and space switching places inside a black hole is at best a rather deceptive simplification. The most important thing about the event horizon is that locally (i.e. to one falling in to it) nothing at all interesting happens at the event horizon. Edit: The "swapping" you are referring to is an artifact of coordinate systems, not of space-time. Thinking something wild happens to space-time as you pass through the event horizon is the same as thinking that something wild happens to the Earth's geometry as you reach the north pole. Sure at the north pole there is no longer any meaningful direction other than "south" but thats an artefact of the coordinate system you're using, the pole is a normal point just like any other.
        gosub100 3y ago
        To any single observer that crosses, I agree with your statement, but it changes the moment you have two observers. I also agree that at the North Pole, "all directions are south", but the difference is you are free to move back and forth. If you picture us in an X-Y plane (which somehow represents all 3 spatial coords), and "up" is the time dimension, then a black hole would be the X-Y plane deformed into a 90-deg "pipe" facing straight down. Once you are in the pipe, your "X-Y" is our "up-down", this is probably the "artifact" you are referring to.
wredue 3y ago
That “sounds” a whole lot like “water has memory” quackery. I don’t want to dismiss it off hand because there’s all sorts of funky things out there, but “information encoded radiation” is something that I’d be pretty immediately and heavily skeptical of.
- gosub100 3y ago
  when you burn a piece of paper, the atoms react into new molecules, some energy is given/taken, but fundamentally you could ~~run~~ simulate the reaction in reverse and see writing in the smoke of burnt paper.
  - kombookcha 3y ago
    Isn't this hampered by the old 'needing a universe-sized supercomputer to run a fully accurate 1:1 simulation of the universe'? It seems like the complexity of this kind of reverse simulation would be enormous and grow bigger and more complex when you're dealing with something on the scale of black holes. At least unless you can somehow reduce the data complexity dramatically without tainting the simulation, but that seems difficult to do when you're trying to work backwards to an unknown state. At least the pre-burnt piece of paper is known to exist alongside various rules of physics that we know - unlike in the black hole, where those rules all come with a "warrantry maybe void" asterisk.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      re: computational complexity, I am not informed enough to answer that, but I've wondered it too. But we've said things like that before about, say, factoring huge numbers, only to find out that quantum computers can solve it with a fraction of the energy ("orders of magnitude" doesn't even cut it here). The other thing I've wondered is how could you have a detector for those particles without interfering with your measurement (heisenberg's)? Your measurement apparatus will give off heat or very slightly change the shape of spacetime, thus interfering where your particles are detected :(.
    - jampekka 3y ago
CuriouslyC 3y ago
In order for space to truly be continuous, particles would have to be represented with effectively infinite position information. Since particles seem to contain finite information, that seems unlikely.
- danbruc 3y ago
  That seems to me to be the wrong way to think about this. I don't think that we have any evidence that a particle stores its position in the same way we might do in a physics simulation, it just sits at some position in space time. What would its position even be, where would the origin of the coordinate system be? And even you could always just pick a coordinate system with the origin right where the particle is, then its coordinates would trivially be zero. If you have several or moving particles and you want to keep the coordinate system fixed, then this will of course no longer work.
  - kromem 3y ago
    It also makes the assumption that the measurement of position must be continuously detailed, which we know in our universe is impossible because of the Plank length. So even if spacetime is continuous and particles do move within it in continuous ways, the combination of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle plus the Plank length means we can never observe such continuity anyways.
    - eigenket 3y ago
      > which we know in our universe is impossible because of the Plank length I think the statement that you are implying here is not known to be correct. We have no idea if it is (theoretically) possible to measure the position of a particle to a precision of less than a Plank length. In some formulations of quantum gravity there are fundamental limits like this, but quantum gravity is difficult at best and sketchy at worst and none of those versions of quantum gravity is without their flaws.
      - kromem 3y ago

by kromem 3y ago

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.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    You made a malformed statement, implying that time and events continue on, like nothing is wrong and the only difference is we can't see it. But space and time switch places inside a black hole. All directions lead toward the singularity, where as in our world, all directions lead toward the future. The units are incompatible between the two worlds.
    - eigenket 3y ago
      Could you perhaps quote exactly what statement I made which is malformed? In any case the picture of time and space switching places inside a black hole is at best a rather deceptive simplification. The most important thing about the event horizon is that locally (i.e. to one falling in to it) nothing at all interesting happens at the event horizon. Edit: The "swapping" you are referring to is an artifact of coordinate systems, not of space-time. Thinking something wild happens to space-time as you pass through the event horizon is the same as thinking that something wild happens to the Earth's geometry as you reach the north pole. Sure at the north pole there is no longer any meaningful direction other than "south" but thats an artefact of the coordinate system you're using, the pole is a normal point just like any other.
      - gosub100 3y ago
        To any single observer that crosses, I agree with your statement, but it changes the moment you have two observers. I also agree that at the North Pole, "all directions are south", but the difference is you are free to move back and forth. If you picture us in an X-Y plane (which somehow represents all 3 spatial coords), and "up" is the time dimension, then a black hole would be the X-Y plane deformed into a 90-deg "pipe" facing straight down. Once you are in the pipe, your "X-Y" is our "up-down", this is probably the "artifact" you are referring to.

wredue 3y ago

That “sounds” a whole lot like “water has memory” quackery. I don’t want to dismiss it off hand because there’s all sorts of funky things out there, but “information encoded radiation” is something that I’d be pretty immediately and heavily skeptical of.

gosub100 3y ago
when you burn a piece of paper, the atoms react into new molecules, some energy is given/taken, but fundamentally you could ~~run~~ simulate the reaction in reverse and see writing in the smoke of burnt paper.
- kombookcha 3y ago
  Isn't this hampered by the old 'needing a universe-sized supercomputer to run a fully accurate 1:1 simulation of the universe'? It seems like the complexity of this kind of reverse simulation would be enormous and grow bigger and more complex when you're dealing with something on the scale of black holes. At least unless you can somehow reduce the data complexity dramatically without tainting the simulation, but that seems difficult to do when you're trying to work backwards to an unknown state. At least the pre-burnt piece of paper is known to exist alongside various rules of physics that we know - unlike in the black hole, where those rules all come with a "warrantry maybe void" asterisk.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    re: computational complexity, I am not informed enough to answer that, but I've wondered it too. But we've said things like that before about, say, factoring huge numbers, only to find out that quantum computers can solve it with a fraction of the energy ("orders of magnitude" doesn't even cut it here). The other thing I've wondered is how could you have a detector for those particles without interfering with your measurement (heisenberg's)? Your measurement apparatus will give off heat or very slightly change the shape of spacetime, thus interfering where your particles are detected :(.
  - jampekka 3y ago

CuriouslyC 3y ago

In order for space to truly be continuous, particles would have to be represented with effectively infinite position information. Since particles seem to contain finite information, that seems unlikely.

danbruc 3y ago
That seems to me to be the wrong way to think about this. I don't think that we have any evidence that a particle stores its position in the same way we might do in a physics simulation, it just sits at some position in space time. What would its position even be, where would the origin of the coordinate system be? And even you could always just pick a coordinate system with the origin right where the particle is, then its coordinates would trivially be zero. If you have several or moving particles and you want to keep the coordinate system fixed, then this will of course no longer work.
- kromem 3y ago
  It also makes the assumption that the measurement of position must be continuously detailed, which we know in our universe is impossible because of the Plank length. So even if spacetime is continuous and particles do move within it in continuous ways, the combination of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle plus the Plank length means we can never observe such continuity anyways.
  - eigenket 3y ago
    > which we know in our universe is impossible because of the Plank length I think the statement that you are implying here is not known to be correct. We have no idea if it is (theoretically) possible to measure the position of a particle to a precision of less than a Plank length. In some formulations of quantum gravity there are fundamental limits like this, but quantum gravity is difficult at best and sketchy at worst and none of those versions of quantum gravity is without their flaws.
    - kromem 3y ago