10 Hot Black Hole Topics

- September 4th 2015, by Alma Ionescu

Image source

Black holes are a hot topic in theoretical physics and the interest of the utmost experts seems to be gravitating around it. As Feynman famously said, physics has practical applications just like sex, but that’s not why people do it. This complex field needs a guide to show how the different areas of research are connected. So why do we have this major controversy around black hole physics? The hype starts with a theory of quantum gravity and the battle over quantum information.

10- The Black Hole Wars

Matter falls in a black hole and matter never comes out. At least this is what was widely believed until the end of the 90’s because black holes provide a straightforward mechanism to destroy information forever. 'The Black Hole War', written by Leonard Susskind, Felix Bloch professor of Theoretical physics at Stanford University, is a historical account of this raging war fought over the fate of matter lost inside black holes. At the beginning of the 80’s, Susskind met Stephen Hawking and the dispute began. Hawking, a general relativist, thought that since the black hole singularity was shown to annihilate whatever fell in, then so be it. This was what the theory told us and there was no point denying it. Moreover, particles couldn't avert this dire fate because of the Penrose Singularity Theorems, which say that all the paths of the infalling matter must and will encounter the central singularity in a finite time. From life and black holes no one comes out alive. Susskind, supporting the quantum mechanical point of view, claimed that information must be preserved one way or another. Things don’t just vanish from the universe. In 2008 when the book was published, it was considered that the war was over as of 2004, when Hawking conceded the bet he took on the fate of information and had to pay up by means of the famous baseball encyclopedia, “from which information can be retrieved at will.”