Black holes may die differently than we thought

[Admin]

New research motivated by string theory suggests possible, and equally strange, fates for evaporating black holes.

Black holes may die differently than we thought : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I do realize that quantum mechanics postulates that information cannot be destroyed. But, I really do not understand why that is a postulate that people assume cannot be violated even by the whole universe getting compressed into a microscopic speck so that everything is just the building blocks of quarks at unbelievable temperatures and densities. Wouldn't that imply that the info about what came before the universe was created is still available to us?

So, can somebody explain why it must be true that information can never be lost? I did read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem , but that logic seems circular to me. Actually, isn't it theoretically impossible to logically prove a negative statement?

 

[Aplu]

For what very very little it's worth, not being an astrophysicist let alone a cosmologist, I keep wondering, wouldn't gravitational radiation also occur from a black hole? After all, it is gobbling up stars' worth of matter, even if it's not all at once, and wouldn't that cause gravitational radiation and thus carry away some of its mass? I find it hard to see how a black hole could turn a star into "spaghetti" without some gravitational radiation, even if it is very faint.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

For what very very little it's worth, not being an astrophysicist let alone a cosmologist, I keep wondering, wouldn't gravitational radiation also occur from a black hole? After all, it is gobbling up stars' worth of matter, even if it's not all at once, and wouldn't that cause gravitational radiation and thus carry away some of its mass? I find it hard to see how a black hole could turn a star into "spaghetti" without some gravitational radiation, even if it is very faint.

We do already know that black holes create gravitational waves when they "merge" with neutron stars and other black holes, because we have already detected gravitational waves from those events.

So, the question is whether gravitational waves that are created inside a super-massive black hole's event horizon are able to escape out through the event horizon, taking energy with them. From what I understand, the theorists think the answer is "no". Gravitational waves seem to travel at the speed of light through space, so they would not be expected to be able to get out through the radius below which escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, which is what the event horizon is.

But, that is simply the prediction of General Relativity Theory, which may not be complete enough to deal with event horizons or whatever is inside them.

One question in my mind is whether gravitational waves are traveling "through space" that is like a static lattice that can be "warped", but cannot "flow", or if "space" is more like a fluid that can flow as well as being able to be compressed and expanded in-place.

If it is really the second possibility, then it is easy to think of "space" as being continuously sucked into a black hole, and going faster than the speed of light once past the event horizon, so light would be getting "swept downstream" faster than it can travel upstream, and thus never get out.

I have mentioned my question about whether space continuously flows into black holes before on this forum, but there has been no discussion of that, so far.

But, do gravitational waves really behave the same way as light in the vicinity of black holes? "Space", the "medium of nothing" that they are thought to travel through, is already theorized to have "moved" (i.e., "expanded") at velocities far exceeding the speed of light in order to make the Big Bang Theory work out. So, why couldn't space be moving faster than the speed of light in the vicinity of black holes?

As for "Where does all that space go inside a black hole of finite radius?" and "Where does a continuous supply of space come from?" the Big Bang Theory already invokes those same questions, and postulates an answer that space can expand and compress "infinitely".

Sometimes I wonder why theorists have not tried to postulate a conservation law for space. For instance, if space is being sucked into black holes all over the universe and space between black holes is expanding all over the universe, is there some sort of balance? Could the increase in the number and sizes of black holes during the most recent epoch of the universe help explain the apparent increase in the rate of space "creation" (outside of black holes) accelerating in the current epoch of the universe - that is, the rate of the universe's apparent expansion currently increasing?