Essay Abstract

John Wheeler coined the phrase "it from bit" or "bit from it" in the 1950s. However, much of the interest in the connection between information, i.e. "bits", and physical objects, i.e. "its", stems from the discovery that black holes have characteristics of thermodynamic systems having entropies and temperatures. This insight led to the information loss problem {what happens to the "bits" when the black hole has evaporated away due to the energy loss from Hawking radiation? In this essay we speculate on a conservative answer to this question using the assumption of self-similarity of quantum correction to the gravitational action and the requirement that the quantum corrected entropy be well behaved in the limit when the black hole mass goes to zero.

Author Bio

Douglas Singleton is a professor at California State University Fresno and currently on a leave at ITB in Bandung, Indonesia. Elias Vagenas is a professor at Research Center for Astronomy and Applied Mathematics, Academy of Athens. In Sept. 2013, he moved to Kuwait University as Associate Professor and joined the Theoretical Physics Group in the Department of Physics. Tao Zhu is a post-doc at Baylor University, and holds a position at the Institute for Advanced Physics & Mathematics,Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou. All three work in the area of gravitational physics, high energy/particle physics and the interface between the two.

Download Essay PDF File

Dear Prof Douglas,

Thank you for presenting your nice essay. I saw the abstract and will post my comments soon. So you can produce material from your thinking. . . .

I am requesting you to go through my essay also. And I take this opportunity to say, to come to reality and base your arguments on experimental results.

I failed mainly because I worked against the main stream. The main stream community people want magic from science instead of realty especially in the subject of cosmology. We all know well that cosmology is a subject where speculations rule.

Hope to get your comments even directly to my mail ID also. . . .

Best

=snp

snp.gupta@gmail.com

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.com/

Pdf download:

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/essay-download/1607/__details/Gupta_Vak_FQXi_TABLE_REF_Fi.pdf

Part of abstract:

- -Material objects are more fundamental- - is being proposed in this paper; It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material. . . Similarly creation of matter from empty space as required in Steady State theory or in Bigbang is another such problem in the Cosmological counterpart. . . . In this paper we will see about CMB, how it is generated from stars and Galaxies around us. And here we show that NO Microwave background radiation was detected till now after excluding radiation from Stars and Galaxies. . . .

Some complements from FQXi community. . . . .

A

Anton Lorenz Vrba wrote on May. 4, 2013 @ 13:43 GMT

....... I do love your last two sentences - that is why I am coming back.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 6, 2013 @ 09:24 GMT

. . . . We should use our minds to down to earth realistic thinking. There is no point in wasting our brains in total imagination which are never realities. It is something like showing, mixing of cartoon characters with normal people in movies or people entering into Game-space in virtual reality games or Firing antimatter into a black hole!!!. It is sheer a madness of such concepts going on in many fields like science, mathematics, computer IT etc. . . .

B.

Francis V wrote on May. 11, 2013 @ 02:05 GMT

Well-presented argument about the absence of any explosion for a relic frequency to occur and the detail on collection of temperature data......

C

Robert Bennett wrote on May. 14, 2013 @ 18:26 GMT

"Material objects are more fundamental"..... in other words "IT from Bit" is true.

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on May. 14, 2013 @ 22:53 GMT

1. It is well known that there is no mental experiment, which produced material.

2. John Wheeler did not produce material from information.

3. Information describes material properties. But a mere description of material properties does not produce material.

4. There are Gods, Wizards, and Magicians, allegedly produced material from nowhere. But will that be a scientific experiment?

D

Hoang cao Hai wrote on Jun. 16, 2013 @ 16:22 GMT

It from bit - where are bit come from?

Author Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta replied on Jun. 17, 2013 @ 06:10 GMT

....And your question is like asking, -- which is first? Egg or Hen?-- in other words Matter is first or Information is first? Is that so? In reality there is no way that Matter comes from information.

Matter is another form of Energy. Matter cannot be created from nothing. Any type of vacuum cannot produce matter. Matter is another form of energy. Energy is having many forms: Mechanical, Electrical, Heat, Magnetic and so on..

E

Antony Ryan wrote on Jun. 23, 2013 @ 22:08 GMT

.....Either way your abstract argument based empirical evidence is strong given that "a mere description of material properties does not produce material". While of course materials do give information.

I think you deserve a place in the final based on this alone. Concise - simple - but undeniable.

    Dear Dr.Douglas Singleton,

    I have down loaded your essay and soon post my comments on it. Meanwhile, please, go through my essay and post your comments.

    Regards and good luck in the contest.

    Sreenath BN.

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1827

      A good essay, that I must reread with attention.

      I am thinking that if the Hawking radiation transfer information from a naked, and not rotating, black hole, then each emitted photon change locally the curvature of the horizon (the change of the emitted entropy must change the surface information).

      If this is true, then the surface is not smooth, and the infrared emission must contain information of the surface (spectrum and polarization information).

      If there are two near naked black hole, then the change of curvature of one emission, change the other black hole absorption curvature.

      Then the temperature of the black hole can be not uniform.

      The problem that I have is that if you have an uniform emission (like a black body radiation) then there is only a spectrum information (so you can determine only the mass of the black hole): is the information contained in the different time of the emissions?

        Hello,

        Congratulations on an excellent essay! I have a question (actually, a set of related questions), which is prompted by P. Nicolini and B. Niedner's "Hausdorff dimension of a particle path in a quantum manifold" (arXiv:1009.3267; Phys Rev D83:024017, 2011). They argue that the existence of a minimal length -- which may reasonably be regarded as a feature of quantum gravity itself -- breaks self-similarity at the minimal-length scale. In view of their argument, it's not clear that self-similarity can or should be invoked to conclude that information/entropy is well-behaved as M approaches zero; hence, there may be a problem with your proposed resolution of the black hole information paradox..

        So, my set of questions is: do you reject the idea that a minimal length exists (and if so, on what do you base your rejection), or do you reject Nicolini and Niedner's argument as flawed in some way (and if so, in what way is it flawed)?

        Thank you, and good luck,

        Willard Mittelman

          A very nice essay,

          The presentation of the relation between the its(physical objects) and bits(information/entropy) as you mentioned it was indeed very interesting and captivating.

          good luck ,

          Salvish Goomanee

            Hi,

            Many for having a look. I or one of my co-authors will try to look at you essay and send any useful comments. In my case it may take >1 week as my position at IT B is finishing and I will be traveling for a few weeks and may not have easy internet access. Best, Doug

            Dear Dr. Mittleman,

            Thanks for your excellent question. Also I hope that the proposal in our essay does not contradict Piero's (i.e. Dr. Nicolini's) and his co-worker's paper since it was Piero who got me thinking about self-similarity and who explained to me some issues with self-similarity and QM/QFT when I visited him last fall. We should have cited the paper you mention and let me recommend this as an interesting and important paper.

            That being said I think there is no conflict between our proposal and Piero's paper. In this paper Piero is interested in the self-similarity of a fractal space-time path. The self-similarity we propose is more abstract in that it is a similarity between the forms of the higher order corrections to the action (i.e. I_i ~ I_0 or the ith correction to the action has the same form as the 0th action and alpha_i ~ alpha_1 or the ith coefficients are similar to the 1st coefficient).

            However in the essay we do make some connection between this abstract self-similarity and the more usual self-similarity of a path -- as one goes to higher order corrections I_i and alpha_i one is going higher energies and *usually* this means shorter distances. But in QG this is not necessarily the case due to the "UV/IR connection" which is discussed very nicely by Susskind and Lindesay in reference [1] of our essay. Basically the UV/IR connection means that the standard idea "higher energy --> shorter distances" breaks down at some point when gravity enters the picture. The argument very briefly is that at first as one goes to higher energy scales one does probe shorter distances as standard QM implies. However at some very large energy the particles one collides are within each others event horizon and the result of the collision is a BH with some horizon radius. The horizon radius now sets the length scale one can probe. As one increases the energy the horizon grows and thus the length scale one can probe *increases*. Thus our self-similarity is to be taken in the sense of each higher correction probing some higher energy scale. Conventionally this means shorter distance scale in QG this is not necessarily the case due to the UV/IR connection of QG.

            Sorry for the long reply and feel free to ask follow up questions/comments. And also thanks for reminding of of Piero's excellent paper which we should have cited.

            Best, Doug

            Dear Singleton, Vagenas and Zhu,

            Superb paper! I just gave you guys a big shot in the arm with a top vote score. The expansion of the action S = S_0 sum_n γ_nħ^nS_0 leads to results similar to yours. This is also interesting for in string theory the action is an expansion of the form

            S = sqrt(-g)(R α'R_{abcd}R^{abcd} O(α'^2)

            where α' is the string parameter that is O(ħ). In the vacuum solution for the Schwarzschild black hole with R_{ab} ~ g_{ab} this will lead to an expansion similar to the one in equation 7 of this paper.

            I have long been interested in the idea there are connections between string theory and LQG. This expansion, both by you and with string theory appear to assume a classical background. The connection to LQG though might remove some of the issues with background dependency of string theory. Also the AdS/CFT correspondence indicates that four dimensional spacetimes have embedded within them the same data as in 10 dimensional supergravity or superstring theory. This means that 4-dim quantum gravity with loops or knots should contain the same information as in superstring theory.

            Cheers LC

              Hi,

              Thanks! We look forward to any comments/advice. We will as well try to read your essay. As I mention above I am moving and doing some traveling in a week so it may take some time. Best, Doug

              Hi,

              If I understand correctly you are worried about the spectrum of emitted Hawking radiation being purely thermal? As you correctly point out this is a problem and in fact is a key point in the information loss puzzle of BHs. The approach we use to Hawking radiation is the tunneling approach pioneering by Wilczek&Parikh, Srinvinsan&Padmanhban, Volovik, Berezin&Boyarsky&Neronov (this last group was actually the first to propose a detailed calculation of Hawking radiation as tunneling but since the paper was published in a good but not so read Russian journal it does not really get the credit it deserves).

              In the tunneling approach it is possible to take into account the back reaction of space-time geometry of the BH due to the energy loss due to Hawking radiation. The effect of this back reaction can be seen in the omega^2 term in our equation (13) in the essay. For a purely thermal spectrum one only has the omega term. What we show is that this back reaction along with the assumption of self-similarity of the quantum corrections leads to a resolution to the information loss puzzle. In our essay information/entropy is not lost but comes out in the non-thermal radiation.

              Best, Doug

              Dears Colleagues,

              Congrats for this beautiful Essay. It is very well written and complementary to my one. You solve the black hole information paradox by showing that the number of microstates between the initial and final states is the same and this implies unitary evolution. My approach finds directly the unitary evolution through a time dependent Schrödinger equation. This permits me to write down explicitly the final state like a pure state rather than a mixed one.

              If you are interested on my approach you can see my Essay here: Christian Corda

              Best wishes and good luck in the Contest,

              Ch.

                Hi,

                Thanks and feel free to ask questions. Also we will try to find to look at your essay and others who posted comments on our proposal. Best Doug

                Hi LC,

                Many thanks for reading our essay and your nice comments. I will certainly try to read your essay soon. As I mentioned I will be moving in a weak (leaving my temporary position at ITB) but should have time after this.

                In regard to your comments you are correct -- our proposal still has the feature of background dependence, which as you point out is also a drawback of string theory. LQG might have some advantage in this regard but I have not followed the developments here closely enough to say anything useful -- but in the LQG talks I have seen the speakers always mention background independence as a good feature of LQG.

                Best, Doug

                Hi Dr. Corda,

                Thanks for taking a look at our essay and your comments. I agree that from reading the title and abstract it appears we are dealing with similar issues in a complementary way. There has been actually a lot of recent interest in the BH information loss puzzle. We will certainly have a look at your essay and send any useful comments/questions. As I mention above I am moving this week from ITB so it may be after one week.

                In any case thanks for the comments and reading our essay and best of luck likewise. Doug

                Please excuse me Professor Singleton, Professor Vagenas and Dr. Zhu,

                I am a decrepit old realist. I do not mean to be critical of your technically perfect essay; I would just like to comment on it.

                "In this essay we look at the connection between physical objects, i.e. "its" and information/entropy i.e. "bits," in the context of black hole physics."

                As I have pointed out in my essay BITTERS, one real unique universe can only be eternally occurring, once. Real unique, once cannot be connected. Every real "it" is unique, once. What you appear to be doing in your essay is simply finding an abstract connection between abstract objects and abstract information/entropy in the context of abstract black hole physics.

                  Can we Wheeler a black hole?

                  Is the nothing inside of a black hole real? No

                  Is the something outside of a black hole real? Yes.

                  Energy is made of particles and waves. What are black holes made of?

                  Good luck, Joe