What happens to the quantum information ingested by a black
hole? In 1997,
Thorne and Hawking argued that information swallowed by a
black hole is
forever hidden, despite the fact that these dense objects do
emit a
peculiar kind of radiation and eventually evaporate.
Preskill countered
that for quantum mechanics to remain valid, the theory
mandates that the
information has to be released from the evaporating black
hole in some
fashion. Although Hawking conceded in 2004, the disagreement
between
Preskill and Thorne still stands.
Smolin and Oppenheim now find that one of the main
assertions made about
black holes may be flawed. It is often assumed that as the
black hole
evaporates, all of the information gets stored in the
remnant until the
very end, at which point the information is either released
or else
disappears forever. Instead, Smolin and Oppenheim suggest
that the
information is distributed among the quanta thatescape
during evaporation,
but is encrypted and thus effectively locked away.
The catch is that it can only be accessed with the help of
the quanta
released when the black hole disappears, in much the same
way as a
cryptographic key unlocks a coded message. The result offers
a link between
general relativity and quantum cryptography. — DV
Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 081302 (2006).
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