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?
-----Original Message----- From: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:math-fun- bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Simon Plouffe Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 2:44 AM To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Subject: Re: [math-fun] "firewall paradox" about black holes
Hello,
but ? , ok let's say that hypothesis 1 is good then suppose someone trows a copy of the week-end edition of the NYT, the big one then waits a while , perhaps a very long time :
How the information is restored ??? The journal just pops out in thin air untouched ? Does this makes sense ?
Simon Plouffe
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