Essay Abstract

In 1976 S. Hawking claimed that "Because part of the information about the state of the system is lost down the hole, the final situation is represented by a density matrix rather than a pure quantum state" (Verbatim from ref. 2). This was the starting point of the popular "black hole (BH) information paradox". On the other hand, during one of his famous quantum field theory lectures at Harvard, S. Coleman claimed that "The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction." One of the highest levels of abstraction concerning the harmonic oscillator in Nature is surely represented by BH quasi-normal modes (QNMs), which are a countable set of damped oscillations representing the BH's reaction to perturbations. In a series of papers, together with collaborators, I naturally interpreted BH QNMs in terms of quantum levels. Here I explicitly write down a time dependent Schrödinger equation for the system composed by Hawking radiation and BH QNMs. The physical state and the correspondent wave-function are written in terms of an unitary evolution matrix instead of a density matrix. Thus, the final state results to be a pure quantum state instead of mixed one. Hence, Hawking's claim is falsified by an application of Coleman's claim. Information comes out in BH evaporation in terms of pure states in an unitary time dependent evolution. The assumption by 't Hooft that Schröedinger equations can be used universally for all dynamics in the universe is in turn confirmed, further endorsing the conclusion that BH evaporation must be information preserving.

Author Bio

Theoretical physicist, Ph.D in Physics at the Pisa University. I am Professor of Theoretical Physics, Chairman and Founding Father of the Institute for Theoretical Physics and Advanced Mathematics (IFM) Einstein - Galilei, in Prato, Italy. I started to work on gravitational waves. In the last two years my research was focused on black hole thermodynamics. I am also Editor and/or Editor in Chief of various international journals in the fields of Theoretical Physics, Astrophysics and Mathematics

Download Essay PDF File

Dear Dr. Corda,

Glad to see you here again.

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

    Dear Sreenath BN,

    Thanks for your interest in my work.

    I am going to read your Essay and I will post my comments in your page.

    Best wishes and good luck in the contest,

    Ch.

    Christian,

    Great work. The paper by Singleton, Vagenas and Zhu comes to remarkably similar conclusions. It is clear that conservation of quantum information requires that Hawking radiation have some deformation from blackbody radiation when the number of Planck masses that make it up becomes small.

    Cheers LC

      Hi LC,

      Thanks for your congrats.

      As you know, I have already read your Essay before submitting my one. It is excellent.

      Yes, the Essay by Singleton, Vagenas and Zhu is pretty and complementary to my one. I agree that Hawking radiation has deformations from black body radiation and this is exactly what permits information to come out. In my personal opinion, perfect black bodies do not exist in nature. Also CBR is not exactly thermal.

      Cheers,

      Ch.

      From a non-specialist, I am reading the higher valued community papers as I find them cogent. This paper offers an intriguing approach to the relationship between quantum jumps and the place of information in black-hole emissions and absorptions. It is beyond my technical expertise to evaluate the quality of the assumptions made throughout this paper, but the assumptions are explicitly and clearly stated. The paper is well written, addresses current concerns in physics, and builds on appropriately selected foundations. Its direct relationship to Its from Bits is implied.

        Hello Christian,

        Excellent essay! Very readable and nice balance of history and insight! I particularly like that you allow information to be preserved after Black Hole evaporation. I find this ought to be the case in my essay too.

        Great work!

        Kind regards,

        Antony

          Dear Christian,

          Very interesting essay, and I should say, your approach is one of the most natural ones. I fully agree that unitary evolution remains true in any circumstances. I think is great that the state vector of the Hawking radiation plus the black hole evolves unitarily. As you know, in my research concerning singularities in general relativity, I advocate the viewpoint that singularities don't block the evolution equations (including the unitary evolution). This may be complementary to your results. (I also work for many years, in parallel, to show that unitary evolution is not broken by quantum measurement. I mean that the so called wavefunction collapse is truly unitary, not just when we consider all universes in the multiverse, or decohered branches etc. There are some huge difficulties here, but at least I could show that this is not impossible in principle, if we admit delayed initial conditions.)

          Congratulations for your essay.

          Best regards,

          Cristi Stoica

            Christian,

            sorry if I cannot sincerely express my congratulations, since your paper is technical (in the sense that it uses formulas from other papers, which I should take from granted, and I cannot use my own judgement).

            However, apart from this I made an automatic search in your pdf, and I couldn't find a single instance of the word "Bit"! There is some slight relation with the theme of the competition (but essentially any paper in physics would have it).

            My candid question is now: It from bit or Bit from It?

            Thank you

            Mauro

              Dear Darrell R. Poeppelmeyer,

              Thanks for your kind comments. I am very happy that you were amused by my Essay. In particular, it is very gratifying for me that my Essay is appreciated by a non-specialist.

              Thanks again, I am going to read your Essay too.

              Best wishes and good luck in the Contest,

              Ch.

              Hi Antony,

              Thanks for your kind congrats. I am pleasured by your judgement on my Essay.

              I am going to read your Essay and I will post my comments on your FQXi page.

              Thanks again.

              Best regards and good luck in the Contest,

              Ch.

              Dr. Corda,

              I find your paper to be interesting, especially if it is confirmed that Hawking's prediction is proven false. However, I feel that it does not address the core questions of this competition.

                Hi Cristi,

                Nice to see you here, and thanks for your kind congrats.

                I am pleasured to read that you think my approach is one of the most natural ones. In fact, I think that the correspondence between emitted radiation and proper oscillation of the emitting body is a fundamental Principle of Nature. If this is correct, the production of Hawking radiation should be no different than the production of any other type of radiation. If one wants to produce electromagnetic radiation, say at 1 KHz, one needs to take electric charges and vibrate them at 1 KHz. The same should hold for Hawking radiation; waves of a certain frequency should be produced when the characteristic time for the black hole to shift about (i.e. the quasi-normal oscillations) is comparable to the period of the waves.

                I surely agree with your viewpoint that singularities don't block the evolution equations, including the unitary evolution. Yes, it is complementary to my results. Also your ideas on the intrinsic unitarity of the wave-function collapse, implying that unitary evolution should not be not broken by quantum measurement, look very interesting.

                I am going to read your Essay in order to better deepen my knowledge on your interesting research.

                Thanks again and good luck in the Contest.

                Cheers,

                Ch.

                Dear Mauro,

                Thanks for your comments.

                Actually, formulas from other papers are used only in equations from (1) to (8). Such formulas essentially arise from my published papers (only eqs. (1) and (2) are by Hawking and Parikh and Wilczek, which are obviously and properly cited). The other formulas are completely new and proper of this Essay although, after a rigorous definition of the quantum problem, I use a standard method of calculation in quantum mechanics following the book by Sakurai (which is also obviously and properly cited).

                I do not think that the relation of my Essay with the theme of the competition is slight. Although "It From Bit or Bit From It" is the title of the Contest, you can easily check that topics like "How does nature (the universe and the things therein) "store" and "process" information?" and "How does understanding information help us understand physics, and vice-versa?" are fully taken into account in my Essay. On the other hand, it is historically well known and also stressed in the interesting Essay by Douglas Singleton, Elias Vagenas, & Tao Zhu, which looks to be complementary to my one, that (verbatim from the Essay by Singleton, Vagenas and Zhu) "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." In fact, if Hawking's original claim was correct, black holes should destroy bits of information. Showing the unitary evolution of black hole evaporation instead implies that bits of information are preserved. On the other hand, the worst consequence of destruction of bits of information by a physical process is that quantum mechanics breaks down. I also think it is not a coincidence that the great scientist who coined the phrase "It from bit or Bit from It?" in the 1950s, i.e. John A. Wheeler, was the same scientist who popularized the term "black hole" in the 1960s.

                Concerning the question It from bit or Bit from It? it is my opinion that the relation between "bits", i.e. information and "its", i.e. physical objects

                is similar to the one between matter and space curvature. Once again, the better formulation of this latter relation is by John A. Wheeler: "Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move". In the same way, I think that "bits" and "its" are complementary, i.e. "information tells physics how to work. Physics tells information how to flow".

                Best wishes and good luck in the Contest,

                Ch.

                Dear Stuart Heinrich,

                Thanks for your comments and for finding interesting my Essay.

                As I explained above, in the reply to Dr. D'Ariano, I do not think that my Essay does not address the core questions of this competition. I rewrite here my reply to Dr. D'Ariano almost verbatim. Although "It From Bit or Bit From It" is the title of the Contest, you can easily check that topics like "How does nature (the universe and the things therein) "store" and "process" information?" and "How does understanding information help us understand physics, and vice-versa?" are fully taken into account in my Essay. On the other hand, it is historically well known and also stressed in the interesting Essay by Douglas Singleton, Elias Vagenas, & Tao Zhu, which looks to be complementary to my one, that (verbatim from the Essay by Singleton, Vagenas and Zhu) "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." In fact, if Hawking's original claim was correct, black holes should destroy bits of information. Showing the unitary evolution of black hole evaporation instead implies that bits of information are preserved. On the other hand, the worst consequence of destruction of bits of information by a physical process is that quantum mechanics breaks down. I have instead shown that quantum mechanics works in black hole evaporation and bits of information are in turn preserved in that process. I also think it is not a coincidence that the great scientist who coined the phrase "It from bit or Bit from It?" in the 1950s, i.e. John A. Wheeler, was the same scientist who popularized the term "black hole" in the 1960s. Also, attempts to solve the black hole information loss puzzle opened the road to various interesting physical ideas concerning information, like for example the Holographic Principle.

                I will read and quote your Essay too.

                Best wishes and good luck in the Contest,

                Ch.

                My pleasure & thanks - I hope my essay doesn't disappoint.

                Best wishes,

                Antony

                Christian,

                I not only agree your thesis conceptually, but also consider that if all essays stuck rigidly to the narrowest interpretation of the subject question then we'd be bored to death reading the essays. There would also certainly be more limited value in terms of understanding emergent from the competition.

                Both our essays are alike in this respect, evidencing important and new findings and understandings which have a direct effect on the answer to the question. To me yours beautifully provides the mathematical solution in terms of the present doctrine but consistent with my own apparently 'off doctrine' argument of a recycling model, where the information accretion and (re-ionization as) radiation is the hub of the cyclic process. For me then the importance of the task makes the maths essential, though I'd be intrigued by your view on my conceptual 'Dirac Line' distinguishing mathematics from reality.

                In fact I again set a tall order for my own essay, identifying a higher order of variations within the qubit and showing how these can resolve the EPR paradox. Perhaps too high as many don't fully understand Bell's case. I look forward to your own views on it (see also Gordon Watson's close mathematical analogy of it).

                I hope the value of yours emerges. Well done, including for hitting the front even with my score yet to come! The annual roller coaster ride starts again.

                Peter

                  Resp Prof Christian,

                  Thank you for elaborating Black hole physics and math with your nice essay. I want to ask you some thing:

                  Black holes are mathematical singularities. They were not found even after 100 years of their proposal. Thousands probably millions of scientist and astronomers searched in vain to find them. They wasted their energy, time and much more valuable brain power in vogue.

                  Do you really think searching Astronomical or Micro black holes is necessary?

                  When the BH ITSELF is just a mathematical entity, will further work on this thinking the BH is physical entity is that justified...?

                  For your guidance please....

                  and

                  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 Peter,

                    Nice to see you here in the Contest again.

                    Thanks for agreeing with my point of view and for appreciating my Essay.

                    I am going on holidays for about a week. When I will return to home, I will surely read your Essay. In fact, I am very curious concerning your conceptual 'Dirac Line' distinguishing mathematics from reality and your way to solve the EPR paradox. I will read Gordon Watson's Essay too.

                    I wish you good look in the Contest.

                    Cheers,

                    Ch.

                    Dear Satyavarapu Naga Parameswara Gupta,

                    Thanks for your kind comments and for reading my Essay.

                    Your questions are surely interesting, but they need time to be replied in detail. Now, I am going on holidays for about a week. When I will return to home, I will surely answer your stimulating questions in details and I will also read your Essay.

                    Kind regards and good luck for the Contest,

                    Ch.