Young people? Nothing but trouble. If you don’t believe the politicians, just look at physicists’ current anguish over the question of what is lost when stuff falls into a black hole. We are now in the middle of a huge crisis of confidence, just because the kids couldn’t keep their ideas to themselves.
If you think that stuff in a black hole just gets swallowed up, never to be seen again, you’re half right. The stuff is indeed gone. Yet the information about the stuff can’t be. In the 1970s, a young Stephen Hawking showed that, due to a quirk of quantum theory, black holes don’t just swallow; they also spit. A trail of particles is emitted from a black hole over its lifetime. As a result, the black hole eventually loses so much energy that it evaporates and disappears from the universe. According to Hawking’s theory, those particles contain no information of any kind, so the original information is lost once the black hole disappears.
However, a fundamental law of physics states that information can’t be destroyed. In 1997, John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology was so confident that Hawking must be wrong that the pair entered into a bet. That year, a young theorist called Juan Maldacena showed that, as stuff fell in, the information could be caught on the “event horizon”, the spherical surface of a black hole. With the information residing on the event horizon, it isn’t erased from the universe and might eventually leak back out.
Maldacena’s work was convincing enough for Hawking to concede. In 2004, he bought Preskill a baseball encyclopaedia (for reasons we won’t go into here) and the bet was considered settled.
Then, in 2010, along came the vibrant young mind of Mark Van Raamsdonk. His work has led to the new debate over the “cosmic firewall”. For information on the event horizon to leak back into the universe, there has to be a layer of ultra-high-energy particles – a firewall – just inside the event horizon. Each particle taking information from the event horizon has what Albert Einstein once termed a “spooky” link with a particle in the firewall. The link is called “entanglement” and it means that you can’t fully describe one of the particles unless you have information that resides in the other.
The problem is, the nature of Hawking’s original result shows that the particle on the outside of the event horizon also has to be entangled with another particle, one that carried away a little information from the black hole some time in the past. And a single particle can’t share that kind of entanglement with two others. So Maldacena’s idea doesn’t work. The best solution anyone can come up with involves another entanglement, this time between the particle inside the firewall and the particle that left the black hole all that time ago. That particular spooky link resolves the problem because those two entangled particles are actually one and the same.
It’s a classic Shakespearean twist. The whole problem has been a case of mistaken identity: the cosmic firewall story is the Twelfth Night of cosmology. However, most physicists don’t like this ending. Resolving all these entanglements stretches credulity too far, they say. The resolution they prefer is to acknowledge that this whole shebang exposes a gaping hole in our understanding of the universe. Maybe, they say, we need to start again.
While they scratch their heads and wonder what to do, Hawking could justifiably ask for his encyclopaedia back. If Preskill has any sense of how to play the foiled schemer, he’ll reluctantly hand it over while muttering something about those pesky kids.
Michael Brooks’s “The Secret Anarchy of Science” is published by Profile Books (£7.99)
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