The Black Hole Information Paradox

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We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.

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Previous Episode:

Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed

These ideas are pretty mind-blowing, but as crazy as black holes are, they’re also kind of … simple. Don’t get me wrong; the math is complicated. But the objects themselves are simple. In fact every black hole in the universe, no matter how it formed or what happened to it afterwards, can be perfectly described with only three properties. Those properties are mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. Or at least this is the proposition behind the famous no-hair conjecture, or no-hair theorem.

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Written by Matt O'Dowd

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