The Royal Institution
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2022
1:27:44 · 1.8M views · Jun 20, 2014
A Royal Institution event with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette on what happens if you fall into a black hole, covering the firewall paradox, the information problem and the holographic principle.
Recommended as a high-level but clear explanation of the black hole information paradox and competing theories, by a physicist known for making quantum mechanics approachable.
5 comments from Hacker News
There's a Royal Institute video featuring Sean Carroll and Jen Ouelette[1] that more fully explains the problem, but as I understand it it comes down to a quantum mechanical principle called monogamy of entanglement---there's only so much entanglement to go around, and if two particles (e.g. the pair of Hawking radiation particles) are fully entangled then they cannot have any amount of entanglement with anything else (e.g. information about the black hole). The result in TFA breaks the entanglement between the Hawking pair, allowing the outgoing particles to encode the black hole's information. [1] this video
Sean Carroll is a master of making quantum mechanics approachable to non-physicists. Here are a few of his talks: - Fermilab 2013: [LINK] - The Royal Institution 2014: this video - The Royal Institution 2020: [LINK]
Black hole Firewalls with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette (45m+50s quick summary of the holographic principle) this video Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram (more dense/verbose) [LINK]
Also see Black hole Firewalls - with Sean Carroll (speaking at 20:25) and Jennifer Ouellette this video which explains the paradox and several different competing theories at a high level.
locality is looking suspect for other reasons too, as it's one of the only ways to avoid 'black hole firewalls' [1] (the other way to avoid firewalls involves giving up conservation of information which would be bad for QM theory). [1] Black hole Firewalls with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette this video