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March 17, 2022 03:22 pm

'Quantum Hair' Could Resolve Hawking's Black Hole Paradox, Say Scientists

Stephen Hawking's black hole information paradox has bedevilled scientists for half a century and led some to question the fundamental laws of physics. Now scientists say they may have resolved the infamous problem by showing that black holes have a property known as "quantum hair." From a report: If correct, this would mark a momentous advance in theoretical physics. Prof Xavier Calmet, of the University of Sussex, who led the work, said that after working on the mathematics behind the problem for a decade, his team made a rapid advance last year that gave them confidence that they had finally cracked it. "It was generally assumed within the scientific community that resolving this paradox would require a huge paradigm shift in physics, forcing the potential reformulation of either quantum mechanics or general relativity," said Calmet. "What we found -- and I think is particularly exciting -- is that this isn't necessary." Hawking's paradox boils down to the following: the rules of quantum physics state that information is conserved. Black holes pose a challenge to this law because once an object enters a black hole, it is essentially gone for good -- along with any information encoded in it. Hawking identified this paradox and for decades it has continued to confound scientists. There have been innumerable proposed solutions, including a "firewall theory" in which information was assumed to burn up before entering the black hole, the "fuzzball theory" in which black holes were thought to have indistinct boundaries, and various exotic branches of string theory. But most of these proposals required rewriting of the laws of quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of gravity, the two pillars of modern physics.

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