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Black Holes may collapse into their exact opposites: White Holes

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Perspicuo

Veteran Member
Joined
Jan 27, 2011
Messages
1,289
Location
Costa Rica
Basic Beliefs
Empiricist, ergo agnostic
IFLScience: Black Holes May Collapse Into Their Exact Opposites: White Holes
http://www.iflscience.com/space/black-holes-may-collapse-their-exact-opposites-white-holes

Despite its name, a black hole is not an empty void. Most black holes form when stars die in a supernova explosion, collapsing under their own gravity. When a star 10 times more massive than the sun dies in a supernova, for example, its mass can be squeezed into a ball with the diameter of New York City. The resulting gravitational field is so strong not even light can escape.

For decades, astrophysicists have wondered whether black holes destroy information -- meaning what falls into them is lost forever. A new model suggests that at the end of their lives, black holes turn into “white holes,” explosively pouring all the material they have ever swallowed into space, Nature reports.

According to the new model, developed by Carlo Rovelli and Hal Haggard from Aix-Marseille University in France, the transformation from a black hole to a white hole would occur right after the initial formation of the black hole. Their model is based on a theory called “loop quantum gravity” -- where gravity and space-time are quantized, woven from tiny-individual loops that can’t be subdivided any further.
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Nature: Quantum bounce could make black holes explode
http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-bounce-could-make-black-holes-explode-1.15573

Black holes might end their lives by transforming into their exact opposite — 'white holes' that explosively pour all the material they ever swallowed into space, say two physicists. The suggestion, based on a speculative quantum theory of gravity, could solve a long-standing conundrum about whether black holes destroy information.

The theory suggests that the transition from black hole to white hole would take place right after the initial formation of the black hole, but because gravity dilates time, outside observers would see the black hole lasting billions or trillions of years or more, depending on its size. If the authors are correct, tiny black holes that formed during the very early history of the Universe would now be ready to pop off like firecrackers and might be detected as high-energy cosmic rays or other radiation. In fact, they say, their work could imply that some of the dramatic flares commonly considered to be supernova explosions could in fact be the dying throes of tiny black holes that formed shortly after the Big Bang.
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This is the science forum, therefore "Isn't that fucking cool?" counts as a valid point.
 
It sounds like this is a proposed hypothesis, so it's not anything remotely approaching "fact," but really cool all the same.

PS -- not sure why that one article brought up Hawking radiation. That seems to be a completely unrelated concept.
 
I have never understood the proposition that information must be conserved. It seems highly desirable... but apparently I dropped my physics major prior to that proof being presented, and I've never seen any logical basis for it to be true other than "we wish it to be so".
 
Emily Lake said:
I have never understood the proposition that information must be conserved. It seems highly desirable... but apparently I dropped my physics major prior to that proof being presented, and I've never seen any logical basis for it to be true other than "we wish it to be so".
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You made me look it up. The short answer is quantum field theory.

http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=24045

The conservation of information is derived from quantum field theory via the quantum Liouville theorem. Quantum field theory works both forward and backward in time, so the conservation of entropy (or information) works both ways. If quantum field theory is correct (as it so far seems to be) then information, in the abstract, is neither created nor destroyed. Pure states remain pure states. A probabilistic combination of pure states keeps the same set of probabilities.

This may sound very strange to anyone familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy generally increases and never decreases. How can these claims be consistent?

The general idea is that the entropy described by the second law is the sum of the entropies of many local objects, such as the Earth, the Sun, the radiation in the nearby space, etc. These things keep getting more and more quantum-entangled. Entanglement means that only some of the possible states of one part can accompany particular states of another. Thus the number of states for the collection is not really the product of the numbers for the parts. Therefore the conserved entropy of the collection is not the sum of the entropies of the parts. The growth of the entropies of the parts is canceled by the growing negative entanglement entropy.

In practice, that entanglement entropy has no measurable consequences in ordinary circumstances. If half the possible states of the Earth, all looking very similar to the other half, can only be paired with half the possible states of Jupiter, which look just like the other half, we see no special consequences. The entropy described by the second law is the one we can monitor.

There may be some more interesting consequences of large-scale entanglement for the problem of what happens at the surface of a black hole. There has been a lot of recent discussion of that. The key words for a search would be "black hole firewall". To try to understand the overall picture may also require understanding the effects of cosmic horizons, discussed in some papers by Lenny Susskind and collaborators.

Mike W.
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Please bear in mind that I only took one intro course in quantum. Much of this answer is over my head, as I have little familiarity with the concepts he mentions and none the equations underpinning the things he discusses. Sorry.
 
Hmm. I googled a bit more. There's a lot of gaps in there, but "information" in this context isn't necessarily the same "information" that I might use in casual conversation. It's talking about the wave function, specifically.

Of course, it does also assume that the wave function is all there is to know about the particle in question, and there is no missing knowledge that we don't yet know that we don't know...
 
Well... it
ATTRACTS A LOT OF ATTENTION
which might be the reason, you know!

In this particular case, I believe perspicuo was using the large, bold font to emphasize that those are the titles of the articles, and set them apart from any commentary of his own. Much like an author may use a larger font for the title or a chapter, or how... oh I dunno... and article in a magazine or a newspaper has a title that is presented in a large, bold font to catch the eye and get people to read it ;)
 
steve_bnk said:
OKAY,BUT

WHAT IS YOUR POINT?
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You guys are wrong. Steve did this to show that the singularity, or point, of the black hole expanded.

Although this whole thread reminds me of Austin Powers right after he was thawed!
 
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