International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) | 2020 Jun 03
Spherical, smooth and simple according to the theory of relativity, or extremely complex and full of information as, according to quantum laws, Stephen Hawking used to say? There is no single answer on how to describe these mysterious cosmic objects. New research now proposes a surprising solution to the dilemma.
We can all picture that incredible image of a black hole that travelled around the world about a year ago. Yet, according to new research by SISSA, ICTP and INFN, black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image. In this way, these cosmic bodies, as affirmed by quantum theories, could be incredibly complex and concentrate an enormous amount of information inside themselves, as the largest hard disk that exists in nature, in two dimensions. This idea aligns with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes black holes as three dimensional, simple, spherical, and smooth, as they appear in that famous image. In short, black holes “appear” as three dimensional, just like holograms. The study which demonstrates it, and which unites two discordant theories, has recently been published in Physical Review X.What researchers have done is apply the theory of the holographic principle to black
holes. In this way, their mysterious thermodynamic properties have become more
understandable: focusing on predicting that these bodies have a great entropy and
observing them in terms of quantum mechanics, you can describe them just like a
hologram: they have two dimensions, in which gravity disappears, but they
reproduce an object in three dimensions. Image Credit: Gerd Altmann / PIxabay
For scientists, black holes are a big question mark for many reasons. They are, for example, excellent representatives of the great difficulties of theoretical physics in putting together the principles of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with those of quantum physics when it comes to gravity. According to the first theory, they would be simple bodies without information. According to the other, as claimed by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, they would be “the most complex existing systems” because they would be characterised by an enormous “entropy,” which measures the complexity of a system, and consequently would have a lot of information inside them. ...
Black Holes in 4D N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills Field Theory ~ Francesco Benini & Paolo Milan
- Physical Review X 10(02):1037 (Apr - Jun 2020) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.10.021037
- arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:1812.09613 > 22 Dec 2018 (v1), 25 Jun 2019 (v3)
