Stephen Hawking at the 2010 press conference in Pasadena, California
Colleagues published the latest article by Stephen Hawking. This is the third work in a series of articles on Hawking’s concept of the black hole information paradox. Here's what it looks like. Black holes are extremely dense temporary spaces that can form when stars collide or destroy giants.
Classical physics suggests that nothing can escape from a black hole, not even light. But in the 1970s. Hawking suggested that black holes can have a temperature and slowly seep into quantum particles. The effect was called “Hawking radiation” and it means that the black hole can eventually evaporate, leaving behind a vacuum that will look the same for each evaporated black hole, regardless of the material with which she dined during her life.
This idea created a problem: during its existence, a black hole absorbed a lot of information in the form of celestial objects. Where did she go? The laws of physics say that no information can be lost: if it existed in the past, then it can be recovered. Therefore, we are faced with a paradox. In 2016, Hawking and his team suggested that black holes are capable of having “soft hair” consisting of photons (light particles) or gravitons (hypothetical particles of gravity), which retain at least some information. They surround the horizon of events of a black hole - the border from which even the light will not be able to get out.
In the new article, Hawking and his team found a mechanism based on a yet unproved assumption — counting the amount of information that “soft hair” can tolerate. The formula is known as the “Hawking equation” and describes the process of releasing Hawking radiation by black holes.
When a black hole swallows an object, its temperature should change. This means that its entropy (disorder of particles) must also change (higher temperatures mean that the particles move faster with more disorder). It turns out that Hawking and his colleagues showed that “soft hair” is capable of detecting the entropy of a black hole. It is not yet known how they can store information and store the entire volume or only a part. Scientists will continue to understand this issue.
