The black hole information paradox results from the combination of quantum mecha

nics and general relativity. It suggests that physical information could disappe
ar in a black hole, allowing many physical states to evolve into the same state.
This is a contentious subject since it violates a commonly assumed tenet of sci
enceâ that in principle complete information about a physical system at one point in
time should determine its state at any other time.[1] A postulate of quantum mec
hanics is that complete information about a system is encoded in its wave functi
on, an abstract concept not present in classical physics. The evolution of the w
ave function is determined by a unitary operator, and unitarity implies that inf
ormation is conserved in the quantum sense.
There are two main principles at work: quantum determinism, and reversibility. Q
uantum determinism means that given a present wave function, its future changes
are uniquely determined by the evolution operator. Reversibility refers to the f
act that the evolution operator has an inverse, meaning that the past wave funct
ions are similarly unique. With quantum determinism, reversibility, and a conser
ved Liouville measure, the von Neumann entropy ought to be conserved, if coarse
graining is ignored.
Stephen Hawking presented rigorous theoretical arguments based on general relati
vity and thermodynamics which threatened to undermine these ideas about informat
ion conservation in the quantum realm. Several proposals have been put forth to
resolve this paradox.
Contents [hide]
1 Hawking radiation
2 Main approaches to the solution of the paradox
3 The equation
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Hawking radiation

The Penrose diagram of a black hole which forms, and then completely evaporates
away. Information falling into it will hit the singularity.In 1975, Stephen Hawk
ing and Jacob Bekenstein showed that black holes should slowly radiate away ener
gy, which poses a problem. From the no hair theorem, one would expect the Hawkin
g radiation to be completely independent of the material entering the black hole
. Nevertheless, if the material entering the black hole were a pure quantum stat
e, the transformation of that state into the mixed state of Hawking radiation wo
uld destroy information about the original quantum state. This violates Liouvill
e's theorem and presents a physical paradox.
More precisely, if there is an entangled pure state, and one part of the entangl
ed system is thrown into the black hole while keeping the other part outside, th
e result is a mixed state after the partial trace is taken over the interior of
the black hole. But since everything within the interior of the black hole will
hit the singularity within a finite time, the part which is traced over partiall
y might disappear completely from the physical system.
Hawking remained convinced that the equations of black hole thermodynamics toget
her with the no-hair theorem led to the conclusion that quantum information may
be destroyed. This annoyed many physicists, notably John Preskill, who in 1997 b
et Hawking and Kip Thorne that information was not lost in black holes. The impl
ications Hawking had opined led to the Susskind-Hawking battle, where Leonard Su
sskind and Gerard 't Hooft publicly 'declared war' on Hawking's solution, with S
usskind publishing a popular book about the debate in 2008 (The Black Hole War:
My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics, ISB
N 9780316016407). The book carefully notes that the "war" was purely a scientifi
c one, and that at a personal level, the participants remained friends.[2] The s
olution to the problem that concluded the battle is the holographic principle, w
hich was first proposed by 't Hooft but was given a precise string theory interp
retation by Susskind. With this, as the title of an article puts it, "Susskind q
uashes Hawking in quarrel over quantum quandary".[3]
There are various ideas about how the paradox is solved. Since the 1997 proposal
of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the predominant belief among physicists is that
information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is not precisely thermal but
receives quantum corrections. Other possibilities include the information being
contained in a Planckian remnant left over at the end of Hawking radiation or a
modification of the laws of quantum mechanics to allow for non-unitary time evo
lution.
In July 2005, Stephen Hawking published a paper and announced a theory that quan
tum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a
black hole, which would resolve the information paradox. His argument assumes th
e unitarity of the AdS/CFT correspondence which implies that an AdS black hole t
hat is dual to a thermal conformal field theory. When announcing his result, Haw
king also conceded the 1997 bet, paying Preskill with a baseball encyclopedia "f
rom which information can be retrieved at will". However, Thorne remains unconvi
nced of Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the award.
According to Roger Penrose, loss of unitarity in quantum systems is not a proble
m: quantum measurements are by themselves already non-unitary. Penrose claims th
at quantum systems will in fact no longer evolve unitarilly as soon as gravitati
on comes into play... like in black holes. The Conformal Cyclic Cosmology advoca
ted by Penrose critically depends on the condition that information is in fact l
ost in black holes. This new cosmological model might in future be tested experi
mentally by detailed analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB)
: if true the CMB should exhibit circular patterns with slightly lower or slight
ly higher temperatures. In November 2010, Penrose and V. G. Gurzadyan announced
they had found evidence of such circular patterns, in data from the Wilkinson Mi
crowave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) corroborated by data from the BOOMERanG experime
nt.[4] The significance of the findings was subsequently debated by others.[5]
[edit] Main approaches to the solution of the paradox
Information is irretrievably lost:
Advantage: Seems to be a direct consequence of relatively non-controversial calc
ulation based on semiclassical gravity.
Disadvantage: Violates unitarity, as well as energy conservation or causality.
Information gradually leaks out during the black-hole evaporation:
Advantage: Intuitively appealing because it qualitatively resembles information
recovery in a classical process of burning.
Disadvantage: Requires a large deviation from classical and semiclassical gravit
y (which do not allow information to leak out from the black hole) even for macr
oscopic black holes for which classical and semiclassical approximations are exp
ected to be good approximations.
Information suddenly escapes out during the final stage of black-hole evaporatio
n:
Advantage: A significant deviation from classical and semiclassical gravity is n
eeded only in the regime in which the effects of quantum gravity are expected to
dominate.
Disadvantage: Just before the sudden escape of information, a very small black h
ole must be able to store an arbitrary amount of information, which violates the
Bekenstein bound.
Information is stored in a Planck-sized remnant:
Advantage: No mechanism for information escape is needed.
Disadvantage: A very small object must be able to store an arbitrary amount of i
nformation, which violates the Bekenstein bound.
Information is stored in a massive remnant:
Advantage: No mechanism for information escape is needed and a large amount of i
nformation does not need to be stored in a small object.
Disadvantage: No appealing mechanism that could stop Hawking evaporation of a ma
croscopic black hole is known.
Information is stored in a baby universe that separates from our own universe:
Advantage: No violation of known general principles of physics is needed.
Disadvantage: It is difficult to find an appealing concrete theory that would pr
edict such a scenario.
Information is encoded in the correlations between future and past:[6][7]
Advantage: Semiclassical gravity is sufficient, i.e., the solution does not depe
nd on details of (still not well understood) quantum gravity.
Disadvantage: Contradicts the intuitive view of nature as an entity that evolves
with time.
[edit] The equation
The entropy of a black hole is given by the equation:

where S is the entropy, c is the speed of light, k is Boltzmann's constant, A is

the surface area of the event horizon, h ("h-bar") is the reduced Planck's Cons
tant and G is the gravitational constant.
[edit] See also
Black hole complementarity
Cosmic censorship hypothesis
Fuzzball (string theory)
Holographic principle
Maxwell's Demon
[edit] References
^ Stephen Hawking. (2006). The Hawking Paradox. Discovery Channel, The: Discover
y, Inc..
^ The Black Hole War p. 10: "It was not a war between angry enemies; indeed the
main participants are all friends. But it was a fierce intellectual struggle of
ideas between people who deeply respected each other but also profoundly disagre
ed."
^ http://richarddawkins.net/articles/2846
^ Gurzadyan, V. G.; Penrose, R. (2010), Concentric circles in WMAP data may prov
ide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity, arXiv:1011.3706 .
^ See Conformal Cyclic Cosmology for more info.
^ Hartle, James B. (1998). "Generalized Quantum Theory in Evaporating Black Hole
Spacetimes". Black Holes and Relativistic Stars. arXiv:gr-qc/9705022.
^ Nikolic, Hrvoje (2009). Resolving the black-hole information paradox by treati
ng time on an equal footing with space. 678. Phys. Lett.. pp. 218â 221. arXiv:0905.05
38.
[edit] External links
Black Hole Information Loss Problem, a USENET physics FAQ page
Preskill, John (1992), Do black holes destroy information?, arXiv:hep-th/9209058
. Discusses methods of attack on the problem, and their apparent shortcomings.
Report on Hawking's 2004 theory at New Scientist
Report on Hawking's 2004 theory at Nature
Hawking, S. W. (July 2005), Information Loss in Black Holes, arxiv:hep-th/050717
1. Stephen Hawking's purported solution to the black hole unitarity paradox.
Hawking and unitarity: an up-to-date discussion of the information loss paradox
and Stephen Hawking's role in it
The Hawking Paradox - BBC Horizon documentary (2005)