Dear Dr Corda,
I found your essay entertaining and informative to read. I particularly liked the little trick you did on the reader by starting with what seemed to be a tangential complaint about how the FQXi Essay process has not treated you fairly, then transitioned into the dream conversation with Einstein. I was caught completely off guard by that one, and got a chuckle out of it.
Incidentally, dream format or not, at one point in that opening you said this:
"Remarkably, ... an Essay [similar to my 2013 FQXi submission that won the popular rating that year] was later published in the prestigious and peer reviewed international journal Annals of Physics [3]. Hence, that publication guaranteed the correctness of my 2013 FQXi submission."
No. Publication of a paper in a prestigious journal only proves that the paper has passed their minimum review standards for being well-argued and plausible. If what you just said were true, then every black hole erasure paper they have ever published or will publish is also "correct", even when those other paper are in direct contradiction to yours. It is the role and duty of any good journal to publish plausible papers. It is not their role to decide which of those papers is "correct." That judgement can only be made by the physics community as a whole, and it seldom happens until long after a new idea is first published.
Apart from the dream presentation format, your essay this year is primarily about your theory for how to resolve the long-running feud about whether black holes do or do not erase information from the universe. I like that you brought out that Hawking has been feuding with himself on this point; it makes it clearer just how contentious this issue has been. You are in the "does not erase" camp. Just so you know my perspective, I also happen to be strongly in that camp.
To get a more direct presentation of your theory I downloaded your reference [3]:
Paper: Corda, Christian, Time dependent Schrödinger equation for black hole evaporation: no information loss, Annals of Physics, 353, 71-82 (2015).
For interested readers, a PDF copy of Dr Corda's paper can downloaded from arXiv by clicking on this link.
It's a good paper. The Bohr idea is... unexpected? but well argued. Here is my heavily edited quote of a sentence from the above paper that (I think?) captures your main concept for resolving the paradox:
Location within paper: Page 13, Section 4, Paragraph 1, Lines 20-24:
Quote: "... [in a virtual particle pair that is undergoing the Hawking radiation process at the event horizon], the particle [that is falling into the black hole with] negative energy ... transfers its part of the wave function and [wave function] information ... to the [black hole quasi-normal mode, which is a radial spin-j perturbation frequency that obeys a time independent Schrödinger-like equation]. [Thus] the emitted [particle becomes] entangled with ... oscillations of the [black hole] horizon."
In short, entanglement saves the day, in combination with these interesting oscillations you define. I like the idea that entanglement plays such an important role in your theory; it just feels right. My own reasons for preferring non-erasure ad much more geometric and time based, but lead to the same conclusion.
Assessment of your essay
-- Nice theory, and well-argued, especially in your reference paper such as the one above.
-- Nice and amusing format for presenting your argument for your theory.
One rather specific opportunity for improvement, one that I truly think could help get better traction for your theory in future papers and essays, is to work on reducing sentence redundancy in your paragraphs. You have a tendency (as do I incidentally) to take "multiple tries" at explaining the same idea, which bloats your paragraphs by leaving a trail of similar sentences. That can be confusing to readers, who may not be able to tell whether one particular sentence is a new idea or just a different way of saying the same idea. You might try sitting down for an hour or two with a really good technical editor to get some tips on how to figure out exactly what you want to say in each paragraph, and how to say it only once, as clearly and pointedly as possible.
I should also at least mention that the FQXi question this year was pretty much "how do you tell if a theory is fundamental?" Your essay pretty much just ignores that, and instead interprets the essay contest as an opportunity to publish your theory again. Yes, black hole information erasure is a pretty fundamental topic... but so are any number of issues in general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Cheers,
Terry
Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)
Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger
