MICHELLE THALLER: Black holes really are kind
of getting to the very heart of our physics.
And I believe that they're kind of showing
us the way that eventually we're going to
need different physics and new physics.
People ask questions like, "What happens inside
a black hole?"
Or even, "What happens at the very boundary
of a black hole, the event horizon, when light
is absorbed?"
And honestly, our physics is telling us a
lot of contradictory things.
And our image of what an event horizon really
is may be changing.
People like Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind
have recently come up with this idea that
a black hole should not be able to destroy
information.
O.K., what do we mean by information?
Information can be almost anything.
All of the different atoms in my body have
angular momentum, they have charge, they have
mass.
There's all sorts of little bits of information
that make me me.
At the quantum mechanic level, the tiniest
of levels, there are different amounts of
energy, there are different probabilities
that are contained in the structure of my
matter.
And information, in some ways is a form of
energy.
It's actually a way that you can describe
something which is somehow, in a strange way,
a higher energy state than not being able
to describe something.
And so one of the questions is, "If energy
really can't be destroyed energy itself is
something that is intrinsic in the universe,
you can't really created or destroy it is
it possible that information is the same way?
Is there really no way to actually destroy
the information about what all of my subatomic
particles are doing right now?"
So black holes kind of stare you right in
the face.
What a black hole supposedly does is it absorbs
everything.
Space and time bend into a black hole so that
nothing can escape.
That means that any information about the
material that fell in is gone.
The only thing we know about it is that as
a black hole absorbs material, it gets more
massive.
It actually adds that mass to the mass of
the black hole.
And as that mass increases, the event horizon
becomes larger.
Basically, the area where space is so curved
that you can't get out begins to extend the
more massive a black hole is.
The most massive black holes we know of in
the universe are many billions of times the
mass of our sun.
And the physical extent of this event horizon
is about the size of our solar system, maybe
like out to the planet Pluto.
So is it possible, then, if everything goes
into a black hole and nothing ever comes out,
space and time go inside the black hole and
don't come out?
What happened to that information?
And this has begun to make a lot of people
wonder if we really have thought of black
holes the wrong way.
Maybe there isn't an event horizon in the
true sense.
I actually had a friend of mine that studies
black holes say, "Well, I'm not sure if they're
black.
They may be very, very dark navy blue."
And what he meant by that is, maybe there
are some tricks to actually get information
out of a black hole.
Maybe there really is some form of energy
that can leak away from the black hole over
time.
Now, Stephen Hawking wondered if quantum effects
very near the event horizon could actually
separate something called virtual particles,
the energy of space itself.
If you're familiar with Einstein's equation,
E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times
the speed of light squared.
Energy and mass are the same thing.
They're equivalent.
You can actually make mass into energy, and
you can make energy into mass.
Around a black hole, where there's very hot
gas, very high temperatures, very strong magnetic
fields, perhaps, there's a lot of energy.
And that energy can actually manifest itself
as particles, mass.
And the energy always creates particle/antiparticle
pairs.
They're called virtual particles.
And matter and antimatter, the thing you know
about it is that it annihilates immediately.
So these tiny little particles come into existence,
then annihilate, and you're back to energy.
And this happens all around us all the time.
So, if this happens near a black hole, it's
possible one of these little particles can
go into the black hole and the other one escapes.
And all of a sudden, there's a particle that
shouldn't be there.
The universe basically has a new particle,
energy from nowhere.
And how can that work?
And the information theory people say that
what happens is that energy has to come out
of the black hole.
The black hole's mass begins to decrease if
there is this poor little orphan particle
that shouldn't have been there in the first
place.
So over time, tiny particle by tiny particle,
These black holes can evaporate away.
And maybe there's something about those virtual
particles that contain some information about
the black hole and what fell into it.
It even gets stranger than that, because a
lot of people think that time goes slower
and slower as you approach a black hole, till,
at the event horizon, time basically stops.
So instead of anything really ever falling
into a black hole, what the event horizon
may be is some sort of shell of information.
Things are stopped in time as they fell into
the black hole.
And right at that boundary, there is almost
kind of a sphere, a two-dimensional surface
that somehow contains all the information
about what's inside the black hole.
And this reminded people of something that
the humans invented, called a hologram.
Now, a hologram is a two-dimensional object.
You can make it out of glass or a piece of
film.
And you shine a light through it, and all
of a sudden, there seem to be three-dimensional
projections.
And the idea is that are we looking at some
fundamental way the universe stores information.
Around a black hole, where space and time
have been crushed out of existence, could
there be a shell of information, something
like a hologram?
And a lot of people began to wonder, maybe
that's the way the universe works on a larger
scale.
Maybe black holes are showing us, intrinsically,
what the underlying nature of reality is,
that there really is a two-dimensional surface
of something that contains all information
about the entire universe.
Maybe in some way, we are part of this giant
hologram.
And I should mention that the word, hologram,
in no way implies that somebody made the hologram.
We're just talking about the universe may
really be information contained in a two-dimensional
structure, not the three dimensions that we're
aware of now.
This all sounds incredibly strange.
I'm always a little bit afraid to even talk
about it.
But I think that the thing to really kind
of gain from this is that black holes are
staring us right in the face.
We're now observing them.
They're right there.
And we cannot really describe how the universe
should work with one of these things.
They don't make sense.
The universe shouldn't be able to lose information.
So how do you get information when space itself
are bent in and nothing comes out?
Black holes may be the key to where the next
physics has to go.
We all know that we need a next Einstein,
a next quantum theory, something that actually
describes how gravity works in very intense
situations like a black hole.
Now we're actually observing black holes well
enough that we really have to get on this.
We really have to figure out how the universe
works around one of these things.
And we may end up learning what the universe
itself really is.
