Physicists come close to resolving the black hole information paradox (2020)(quantamagazine.org) |
Physicists come close to resolving the black hole information paradox (2020)(quantamagazine.org) |
>What’s going to happen with this new solution? Most likely, someone’s going to find a problem with it, and everyone will continue working on their own solution. Indeed, there’s a good chance that by the time this video appears this has already happened. For me, the real paradox is why they keep doing it. I guess they do it because they have been told so often this is a big problem that they believe if they solve it they’ll be considered geniuses. But of course their colleagues will never agree that they solved the problem to begin with. So by all chances, half a year from now you’ll see another headline claiming that the problem has been solved.
>And that’s why I stopped working on the black hole information loss paradox. Not because it’s unsolvable. But because you can’t solve this problem with mathematics alone, and experiments are not possible, not now and probably not in the next 10000 years.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/04/i-stopped-working-o...
I thought Sabines point is that the measurements required to confirm the theory aren't possible, so it's largely lots of money and time going into pointless speculation right now - even if you find the right solution you have no means to test it.
Mathematics you can make your own proofs on paper, physics is not the same.
No. What might emerge are hydrogen molecules (following quark confinement, free neutron decay, chemistry, etc.). The "information" to "reconstitute" the unfortunate astronaut's body is diffused forever.
Why do people write this stuff?
For that matter, try this wild speculation: Lenny Susskind, "Dear Quibitzers" GR=QM[0], in which he reifys[1] his toy models and carries on as if they were (almost) objective reality.
He's a professor at Stanford. I'm reminded of Pauli's remark, "Your theory is crazy. But is it crazy enough?" It seems that a physicist can say almost anything these days.
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03040 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
1. Abandon for a moment the idea that we are special
2. Imagine what the most simplified agent that "experiences" things would look like. For example a simple machine that observed am experiment and reduces it into a simple "do I see interference bands or do I see only one band?" and records it to some simple memory.
3. Let the wave in superposition interact with the machine and compute what happens to the machine now that it is itself entangled with the wave
4. Very hard math
5. The machine is in a superposition state of various state, each observing the wave collapse
> Let the wave in superposition interact with the machine
This is the key point right, that an observation cannot be made without a very real, physical, interaction, that necessarily influences the thing being observed?
My gut says though, that the main problem is probably thinking it is ever possible to be outside the experiment.
Other than taking enough physics to get a EE degree, I don't know physics. One explanation I've heard from a physicist appeals to me. He said something like:
All the confusion about wave/particle duality is because we explain physics in terms of intuitions we have in our daily lives. Sometimes the analogy that is most convenient is to use a wave metaphor, and sometimes the best analogy is to use a particle metaphor ... but in both cases it is neither particle nor wave.
When I think of wave-particle duality, I think its just the expression of 2 facts. Matter waves show interference effects. Matter waves are only ever observed in a definite position, never in a superposition.
But position isnt special right? We never observe a superposition of momentum (move at 2 speeds) either. And neither are macroscopic states, we never observed an (1/sqrt(2))(alive + dead) cat either.
So evolution isn't observation and intermediate states aren't real.
After the interaction your become part of the same quantum system and that affects what you can observe next.
When you become a system where the state is a superposition of "electron spin up + you see an electron spin up" and "electron spin down + you see an electron spin down" then you when you observe the electron in spin down you'll always see the electron as spin down because, you guessed it, the "you" in this story is the "you see an electron spin down" you of the superposition of yous