Information trapped in a black hole does not disappear without a trace and may end up in alternative universes - such a theory was put forward by one of the most famous physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking, at a conference on Hawking radiation in Stockholm.
A video of the physicist's speech and a summary of it can be found on the website of the Royal Institute of Technology.
“If you feel like you're trapped in a black hole, don't give up,” Hawking said. - There is an exit.
According to the new theory, black holes do not swallow or destroy information - instead, they store it in a two-dimensional hologram. In this case, information does not get inside the black hole, but ends up on its periphery - on the event horizon, where it is stored in a chaotic, mixed form, useless for practical use.
“The idea is that super broadcasts are holograms of incoming particles. Thus, they contain information that would otherwise be lost,”the theorist believes.
Hawking also suggests that although information is not irrevocably destroyed, it cannot return in its original form to our universe, but it can be somewhere else.
“The existence of alternative theories of black holes suggests that this may be possible. The hole will have to be large, but if it rotates, there may be a transition to another universe. But you will not be able to return back to our universe, - said the physicist. "So, although I would really like to go into space, I would not try."
Promotional video:
Photo: Håkan Lindgren / kth.se
The question of what happens in a black hole and at its boundaries has been worrying physicists for many decades. According to the principles of quantum mechanics, information cannot completely disappear even in a black hole; at the same time, if information has fallen into a black hole, it is impossible to return it, which means that it can be considered irretrievably lost.
Hawking's new idea suggests that information does not actually fall into the black hole itself, which means it can get out of it.
According to the earlier and widely known theory of Stephen Hawking, black holes are able not only to increase their mass by absorbing matter, but also to lose it due to "evaporation". The quantum process of the emission of particles by a black hole is called Hawking radiation.
The idea of getting out of a black hole is not entirely original, the Wall Street Journal notes. A similar thought is the professor at Utrecht University, Nobel Prize winner in physics Gerard 't Hooft in 1996. Then he suggested that Hawking radiation could carry information out of the hole, but this idea went unnoticed, and the physicist himself did not consider it promising.
A Dutch physicist who attended a conference in Stockholm said it was not yet clear whether Hawking had progressed further than he himself 20 years ago, and whether he resolved the difficulties that 't Hooft faced.