The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its Endhttps://www.quantamagazine.org/the-black-hole-information-paradox-comes-to-an-end-20201029/In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago.
Information gets out through the workings of gravity itself — just ordinary gravity with a single layer of quantum effects. ... Muted at first, these effects come to dominate when the black hole gets to be extremely old. The hole transforms from a hermit kingdom to a vigorously open system. Not only does information spill out, anything new that falls in is regurgitated almost immediately.
The work is highly mathematical and has a Rube Goldberg quality to it, stringing together one calculational trick after another in a way that is hard to interpret. Wormholes, the holographic principle, emergent space-time, quantum entanglement, quantum computers: Nearly every concept in fundamental physics these days makes an appearance, making the subject both captivating and confounding.
... In some way or other, space-time itself seems to fall apart at a black hole, implying that space-time is not the root level of reality, but an emergent structure from something deeper. Although Einstein conceived of gravity as the geometry of space-time, his theory also entails the dissolution of space-time, which is ultimately why information can escape its gravitational prison.
... But rather than think of the wormholes as actual portals sitting out there in the universe, Mahajan and others speculate that they are a sign of new, nonlocal physics. By connecting two distant locations, wormholes allow occurrences at one place to affect a distant place directly, without a particle, force or other influence having to cross the intervening distance — making this an instance of what physicists call nonlocality. In the black hole calculations, the island and radiation are one system seen in two places, which amounts to a failure of the concept of “place.” “We’ve always known that some kind of nonlocal effects have to be involved in gravity, and this is one of them,” Mahajan said. “Things you thought were independent are not really independent.”
Wormholes crop up because they are the only language the path integral can use to convey that space is breaking down. They are geometry’s way of saying the universe is ultimately nongeometric.
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