Now I know what you’re thinking. Yes, there has just been a blog on black holes, and yes in this blog we went over a quick rundown about the lifetime of a black hole… so what more do we need to know? The truth is, we barely scratched the surface relating to the mysteries and theories of black holes, so sit back, relax, and read about how black holes could potentially delete the entire universe as we know it.
As mentioned in my last blog, the lifetime of a black hole will span trillions upon trillions of years and will be the last known thing in the universe until it eventually loses its mass and explodes due to hawking radiation. The universe at this moment will be empty… This may already prove to be quit frightening, but a bigger issue would have taken place at some point during the black hole’s lifetime. The blackholes may have deleted fundamental information in our galaxy.
We now encounter the Information Paradox, which can be tricky to understand. I’ll try to do my best and start off by explaining information. So, what is information and how is it fundamental to our universe?
Let’s define information as an arrangement of particles. A specific arrangement of carbon atoms gives you coal, while arranging them in another way gives you diamond. Adding a few more atoms will give us a banana, while changing the arrangement can give us a squirrel. The building blocks of the universe are the same. Without information (the arrangement of atoms), everything in the universe would be the same. In theory, if there was a way to measure every single particle, atom, and wave of radiation in the universe, you could see the entire history of the universe right back to the big bang. (Yes that’s a lot to take in, and there’s more coming)!
This is where black holes make everything tricky. Information cannot be destroyed; however, black holes take information and makes everything the same. Black holes can potentially delete the fundamental information of the universe! At this point, the information paradox has three potential outcomes. The first is that information is completely and entirely lost.
With information being lost, the laws of physics that we know today would have to be abandoned and we would have to start entirely from scratch. This may seem both frightening and exciting, the only downside is humanity as we know it would also be deleted in a black hole, so we would never be able to truly witness this theory unfold.
The second is that information is stored. The information that is sucked into black holes may not be entirely lost, however, since it is impossible to cross over the event horizon of a black hole and return, we would never be able to regain this information. This would be like having a broken record of family photos. It’s nice knowing that the photos are safe, but it doesn’t do anyone much good.
The third and most desired outcome is that information is safe. This theory is extremely complicated, and was proposed after implementing the string theory, (may talk about that in a future blog), but I’ll start this theory off by describing one cool way that a black hole can be made. Imagine a laundry basket filled with to the max with socks. It’s impossible to stuff one more sock inside, but with an extremely large amount of force you manage to do so. This extremely dense object closes in on itself and in seconds is a black hole.
Yes, you would technically be killed instantly, however, the more socks or different materials that are sucked into the black hole will cause the black hole to expand ever so minutely. So in order to make room for the extra information, the black hole expanded!
Some scientists and physicists theorize that all information sucked into a black hole can be found to be two dimensional and on that black hole’s surface. Our universe at the moment may simply be 2D information found on the surface of a black hole in another universe. This theory is called the holographic theory, and is extremely complicated, but something that I would personally like to gain more knowledge about.
So yes, black hoes can be extremely complicated, and there is a massive amount of “information” that we simply do not know about them. The truly spectacular fact that we are alive in a time when research is being done to gain more knowledge on black holes. To me, that is amazing by itself.
Never stop Questioning.
