What if Entanglement, Blackholes, and Wormholes Aren't Separate Things?

Researchers claim that together, they solve the famous information paradox

Hiya!

A few months ago, I wrote about a potential solution to what’s known as the black hole information paradox. Now, a new group of scientists believe they have found a different solution to the information paradox, and I gotta say, it’s pretty awesome.

Most of what I’m explaining today is based on the research and a Scientific American article written by Ahmed Almheiri, a theoretical physicist at New York University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

In it, Almheiri lays out the process he and his team went through to arrive at their discovery, and I’ll refer to it a few times throughout today’s newsletter. Admittedly, it’s a bit involved and requires several concepts that are mind-boggling in their own right.

To make it as easy to understand as possible, I’ll first rehash the details and aspects of a black hole relevant to understanding Almheiri’s research. However, if you’re a smarty-pants and already know it, feel free to skip ahead to the juicy bits where I discuss the new research. Either way, bare with me, please — I’m not an accredited scientist, just an avid learner, and curious person.

Anatomy of a Black Hole and the Information Paradox

Part of the enigma of black holes is that we don’t know what’s inside them, but we do know they’re incredibly dense with an enormous mass. As explained by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes devour everything within their gravitational pull — even entire galaxies and light itself.

The event horizon is the boundary between the unescapable insides of a black hole and life as we know it outside of it. In other words, the event horizon is the last chance for light to escape before disappearing into the belly of a black hole.

For a long time, space was considered empty until quantum physics discovered it’s actually bursting with ‘virtual particles,’ which disappear almost as quickly as they appear. They are sets of entangled particles in the form of photons, electrons, quarks, etc., popping up all over the place.

Sometimes, the entangled particle pairs are unlucky and appear too close to the event horizon of a black hole — one particle falls into the abyss while the other escapes.

In 1974, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking pointed out that black holes evaporate the particles that fall on the outside of the event horizon, which form a cloud of radiation (called Hawking Radiation) — and this is the beginning of where things get a bit complicated.

See, according to quantum mechanics, information can never be destroyed. And before the discovery of Hawking radiation, black holes appeared to follow this rule because even though we can’t see or reach the information once it crosses a black hole’s event horizon, we can assume it’s still there.

But Hawkings’ discovery turned the physics world on its head because if a black hole evaporates, then so does all of the information about what’s in it.

This conundrum is known as the information paradox.

As Almheiri says in the SA article:

This means that an evaporating black hole is basically a glorified information shredder, except unlike the mechanical kind, it does a thorough job.

Almheiri and his team figured one of two things must happen to prevent the information paradox from occurring. Either physics is nonlocal and allows information to vanish from inside the black hole and somehow reappear outside the event horizon, or a new layer of entropy must exist.