Starship Asterisk*

neufer wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Now that is a wickedly good post Art, although librarians would be mortified.

• I am a veritable font of 'information.'

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Now that is a wickedly good post Art, although librarians would be mortified.

• I am a veritable font of 'information.'

neufer wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Back to information and black holes, Doesn't the No Hair Theorem imply that all information is lost once it has entered a black hole?

No, I don't think so. It says nothing about information loss, only that the information is not observable from outside the black hole. Black holes are not eternal- they evaporate away over time. Current conjecture is that whatever information they have consumed is returned in the Hawking radiation they radiate away.

The No Hair Theorem is classical non-quantum and does indeed imply that all information is lost once it has entered a black hole.

Hawking radiation is quantum non-classical and does exactly what Chris says.
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Information basically equates to entropy which always increases:

• 1) Encyclopedia Britannica = low information
  2) Shredded Britannica = moderate information
  3) Burned Britannica = high information

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Classical No Hair black holes are low entropy/information.

Quantum black holes are high entropy/information.

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Back to information and black holes, Doesn't the No Hair Theorem imply that all information is lost once it has entered a black hole?

No, I don't think so. It says nothing about information loss, only that the information is not observable from outside the black hole. Black holes are not eternal- they evaporate away over time. Current conjecture is that whatever information they have consumed is returned in the Hawking radiation they radiate away.

• 1) Encyclopedia Britannica = low information
  2) Shredded Britannica = moderate information
  3) Burned Britannica = high information

BDanielMayfield wrote:Back to information and black holes, Doesn't the No Hair Theorem imply that all information is lost once it has entered a black hole?

Chris Peterson wrote:It's good except for the telemetry part. You can't cheat mother nature. From Zart's frame there's no way to see things as they appear from the probe's frame. The signal itself is getting stretched out by relativistic effects.

BDanielMayfield wrote:The following scenario is hypothetical, (unless there are infinite parallel timelines, etc. in which case this may have actually happened many times):

Astrophysicist Zart (from a safe observation point) sends a probe on a trajectory straight toward the center of a black hole. The probe accelerates under universal gravitation such than the probe moves faster and faster as it approaches the black hole, all the while sending back telemetry to Zart's station. Zart sees what Art described, but the probe, rather than getting "squashed flat", actually gets stretched out, spaghettified by tidal force before it very quickly [as opposed to never] crosses the event horizon.

Is anything in this scenario wrong?

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:

neufer wrote:From the outside nothing even makes it to the event horizon.

Everything is slowly frozen and squashed flat just outside the event horizon much like a going into warp drive.

"Squashed flat" equals "crushed", and I think you might be playing frame of reference tricks again Art.

His comment concerns frames of reference, but there's no trick. We never see anything cross a black hole's event horizon. It just gets closer and closer, which means it gets flatter and flatter, but not infinitely thin, and not subject to the issue of information conservation inside a black hole, because the material isn't yet inside and could theoretically be moved away from that black hole.

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:

neufer wrote:

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From the outside nothing even makes it to the event horizon.

Everything is slowly frozen and squashed flat just outside the event horizon much like a going into warp drive.

"Squashed flat" equals "crushed", and I think you might be playing frame of reference tricks again Art.

His comment concerns frames of reference, but there's no trick. We never see anything cross a black hole's event horizon. It just gets closer and closer, which means it gets flatter and flatter, but not infinitely thin, and not subject to the issue of information conservation inside a black hole, because the material isn't yet inside and could theoretically be moved away from that black hole.

BDanielMayfield wrote:

neufer wrote:

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BDanielMayfield wrote:
I'm confused too, perhaps due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "information" means in this context. How can information survive falling into a black hole where everything is crushed by gravity?

From the outside nothing even makes it to the event horizon.

Everything is slowly frozen and squashed flat just outside the event horizon much like a :rocketship: going into warp drive.

"Squashed flat" equals "crushed", and I think you might be playing frame of reference tricks again Art.

neufer wrote:

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BDanielMayfield wrote:
I'm confused too, perhaps due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "information" means in this context. How can information survive falling into a black hole where everything is crushed by gravity?

From the outside nothing even makes it to the event horizon.

Everything is slowly frozen and squashed flat just outside the event horizon much like a going into warp drive.

BDanielMayfield wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:I'm confused too, perhaps due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "information" means in this context. How can information survive falling into a black hole where everything is crushed by gravity?

Information is generally treated as a conserved property, like mass or momentum. Not something that can be destroyed.

That particular conservation "Law" has always been very hard to understand. If we threw something (a newspaper, for example) into a fire, into the Sun or into a black hole how is it's information anything but destroyed?

Chris Peterson wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:I'm confused too, perhaps due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "information" means in this context. How can information survive falling into a black hole where everything is crushed by gravity?

Information is generally treated as a conserved property, like mass or momentum. Not something that can be destroyed.

BDanielMayfield wrote:I'm confused too, perhaps due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "information" means in this context. How can information survive falling into a black hole where everything is crushed by gravity?

BDanielMayfield wrote:
I'm confused too, perhaps due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what "information" means in this context. How can information survive falling into a black hole where everything is crushed by gravity?

Chris Peterson wrote:

dergolem wrote:This is the first APOD I've come across in a long time that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around.
May I ask clarification on something?

In the description, this phrase: "...the information held by a black hole..."
When the word "information" is used, in this context, to what does it refer? I'm sure I'm not asking the question correctly, but information has a different meaning depending on the discipline using it.

Yours is not an easy question to answer. There are entire textbooks on the subject! And it's an area of science and math that is still evolving. At its most basic, information in physics might be thought of as all of the details that describe some system. So in the black hole example, all of the particles that have entered the black hole have physical properties like velocity, momentum, spin, and others. These properties represent information, and that doesn't seem like it should change just because the particles are now part of a black hole.

From a physics standpoint, consider some closed system (a volume of space, perhaps). If you were to measure every property of every point in that space, that would be the total information content. Classical information theory could be invoked if you then symbolically encoded that data in some way.

dergolem wrote:Teachers come in many forms. I am very grateful.

dergolem wrote:This is the first APOD I've come across in a long time that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around.
May I ask clarification on something?

In the description, this phrase: "...the information held by a black hole..."
When the word "information" is used, in this context, to what does it refer? I'm sure I'm not asking the question correctly, but information has a different meaning depending on the discipline using it.

geckzilla wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:If I've learned anything over the past year, it's that it doesn't matter what the majority of Americans think. Policies don't seem to reflect public opinion.

Policies don't need to if policies aren't the driving mechanism of change... which they aren't always.

It certainly doesn't help that coal gets incentives and alternatives get ... ??? It's all an image campaign. It makes us feel nice to see solar panels on roofs and wind turbines here and there, but we're still running on coal and oil.