The Black Hole Information Paradox Comes to an End

&quot;Trick though it is, it has real physics in it. The gravitational path integral doesn’t distinguish replicas from a real black hole. It takes them literally. This activates some of the latent topologies that the gravitational path integral includes. The result is a new saddle point containing multiple black holes linked by space-time wormholes. It competes for influence with the regular geometry of a single black hole surrounded by a mist of Hawking radiation.&quot;<p>Ah yes, the complex of wormhole interlinked blackholes surrounded by mists of Hawking radiation...<p>This style of writing, without the actual math, seems to more so obscure true understanding than reveal it for such a complex construct as english words are very likely insufficient for actually capturing the true meaning.<p>Adding the (partial?) equations of the path integral and&#x2F;or the matrices would allow for an actual understanding without the confining nature of human words.<p>In fact just thinking and writing this comment made me more confused, just a few paragraphs prior the path integral could not be fully calculated, but now here it is certain that &quot;the gravitational path integral doesn’t distinguish replicas from a real black hole&quot;. Just how powerful is this &#x27;mathematical trick&#x27;?

&gt; Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone for good. Particle by particle, the information needed to reconstitute your body will reemerge. Most physicists have long assumed it would; that was the upshot of string theory, their leading candidate for a unified theory of nature.<p>Does this mean string theory produced a prediction? I thought it had no predictive power and that&#x27;s why people didn&#x27;t like it.

I’m glad Quanta changed the title (it should be changed here too). The research is interesting, but the paradox is in the same place it’s been in for years, ie “locality probably doesn’t survive the paradox”.

&quot;To astronauts who ask whether they can get out of a black hole, physicists can answer, “Sure!” But if the astronauts ask how to do it, the disquieting reply will be: “No clue.”&quot;<p>My intuition is that these astronauts would exit the black hole the way a candle exits a flame, i.e., at the atomic or subatomic level, correct?

The title is incorrectly copied. The original says &quot;Nears Its End&quot;

It seems like every few weeks there are these huge, complicated and profound discoveries in physics. I feel like i missed the boat on this, as if I chose the wrong profession or am missing out on something. I should have pursued math further but I probably would not have been smart enough anyway. Wikipedia has no mention of the page curve, so this is pretty cutting-edge and theoretical even by the standards of theoretical physics.

Discussed on Sean Carroll&#x27;s podcast, Mindscape:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;115-netta-engelhardt-on-black-hole-information-wormholes-and-quantum-gravity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;2020&#x2F;09&#x2F;21&#x2F;115-...</a><p>He seems a little non-committal if not skeptical.<p>One telling exchange near the end regarding the gravitational path integral they used:<p>* * *<p>&quot;1:18:41 SC: And there is this trick that you can introduce, ’cause what you’re supposed to do is say, well, integrate up all of the spacetimes that match on to this particular wave function you’re looking at. But the trick is, instead of integrating all the four-dimensional spacetimes that match on to this condition you’re looking at, you can just say, well, I’m going to integrate over all four dimensional spaces, so I’m going to forget about spacetime. I’m just going to do what we call the Euclidean path integral because Euclid just talked about space, not time. And…<p>1:19:13 NE: Oh, you went there. [laughter]<p>1:19:15 SC: I did, I did. This is where I’m going. And so it was sort of like you could justify… It’s a trick. It’s a mathematical trick. And it’s very rigorously justifiable in certain simple cases in quantum mechanics, and it certainly has the smell of being correct in certain more subtle cases in quantum field theory. In quantum gravity, what they were doing with it, it just seemed to be a trick so they could get a finite answer at the end of the day, and it was very unclear why it had anything to do with the real world, but they suggested it did. Maybe they were right. And since then, I think we’ve become a little more comfortable with the idea that we can use this trick of calculating quantum gravity wave functions by integrating over the Euclidean path integral, the set of all the spaces that end up looking like what we want, instead of all the spacetimes that look like what we want.<p>1:20:05 NE: Yes.<p>1:20:05 SC: And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? That’s the kind of wormholes that you’re invoking.<p>1:20:09 NE: Yes, right. That’s what I was trying to sweep under the rug.<p>1:20:11 SC: I know. [laughter] And you were right to do so, but I just like to live dangerously here.<p>[chuckle]<p>1:20:18 SC: So Lenny and Juan have wormholes that are literally good old in spacetime wormholes, and you have wormholes that are in these fake Euclidean spaces that you used to calculate the entropy.<p>1:20:29 NE: That’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And these fake Euclidean spacetimes have more boundaries. There are more edges than our original spacetime, which means that these wormholes are connecting these… More edges than we have in our original spacetime, and therefore, it’s difficult to make sense of them in terms of the original spacetime that we’ve started with.&quot;<p>* * <i>

&quot;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.&quot;

So if enough matter feel into a black hole, we&#x27;d get an entangled parallel universe?<p>Big question then it&#x27;s what is the entanglement &quot;key&quot; and its properties. Or how to even brute force it.

To which my wife says, &quot;Well, we&#x27;ve always said information wants to be free.&quot; I (heart) my wife.

It would make more sense to me if black holes had no internals, so the matter exists on the surface of the horizon. No infinities, and the matter can slowly escape over time. Maybe something in the nature of gravity which prevents more than a certain density to exist in any place and time.

At least to me, it&#x27;s pretty obvious that the shadow follows the form. Gravity is like an echo for mass. It seems that we are now realizing it was wrong to assume that the echo was homogenous. The electron movement process in atoms is emitting gravitational waves. The movement of any type of energy causes gravitational waves. Gravity won&#x27;t be homogenous if the pattern of mass-energy emitting it, isn&#x27;t homogenous. We know most mass comes from cyclic processes, ie. the inner processes of hadrons. So it stands to reason that those processes should have a unique and animated gravitational field.