You're asking me? But seriously: Don't black holes lead to a singularity of the usual physics equations? I suppose the event horizon occurs before this singularity is reached. But I imagine no one knows what happens when the singularity is reached -- is that the case? If so, are there widely believed hypotheses about what happens? E.g., maybe at that point a black hole behaves like a star in reverse time? Or (woo-woo) gives rise to a disjoint piece of the universe? --Dan On 2013-08-17, at 10:33 AM, David Wilson wrote:
Clearly, if you throw your NYT into a black hole, it won't magically reappear intact at some future date. But you don't have to be that dramatic, you can simply burn your NYT and grind the ashes to powder, after which it would be similarly unlikely to return to its former state.
However, suppose you had a time machine that you could use to reverse time. Now burn you NYT and grind it to ash powder. Ostensibly, because our physics works in either time direction, you could use your machine to reverse time and ungrind and unburn your NYT and thus recover its original form amenable to reading. Thus when the NYT was burned and ground, no information was actually lost, it was just transformed into a state you couldn't read. Likewise, if the universe preserves information, then the identity of Jack the Ripper, the fate of Ambrose Bierce, and Fermat's proof of his last theorem are locked away in the present state of things, and could presumably be recovered by reversing time.
If black holes indeed devour information, then if you dropped your NYT into a black hole, even a time-reversal machine could not recover the lost information.
Do I have this right?