The Destruction of Information
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The Destruction of Information
Is information destroyed in a black hole? This question is debated in Leonard Susskind's recent book: "The Black Hole War" (Little, Brown, and Co., 2008). From the overview of the "Tetrahedron Model" and Noether's principle of the conservation of symmetry, it appears that information should be destroyed in a black hole. There are several reasons to think so (contrary to the conclusions of Susskind's book). First, on the premise that the universe begins as light, devolves to matter, and finally evolves and resolves to light again, conserving the original perfect symmetry of free electromangetic energy, information must be destroyed in any physical process which returns matter (and the information which matter contains) to light (because information is an asymmetric state of energy). Such final symmetry-restoring (conserving) reactions and processes include: 1) (actual) matter-antimatter annihilations due to the electromagnetic force; 2) (hypothetical) proton decay due to the strong and weak nuclear forces; 3) (theoretical) "evaporation" of black holes due to "Hawking radiation" (gravitational force); 4) (possible) "Big Crunch" gravitational collapse of the cosmos.
All four processes are driven by symmetry conservation acting through the charges of the four forces of physics. The charges of matter are the symmetry debts of light (Noether's Theorem). Light is a perfectly symmetric form of energy, containing no charges, no time dimension, no gravitational field, and no information. Information is necessarily an asymmetic form or configuration of energy, and hence must be destroyed with charge when charges are annihilated and material energy forms are returned to their original symmetric state, light (in obedience to Noether's Theorem). If the universe begins with light (which contains no information) and returns to light, then information must be destroyed in the process of the final return to (conservation of) symmetry. This is the long or generalized view of information destruction during the process of symmetry conservation as visualized in the "Tetrahedron Model".
A somewhat more detailed view of these same (above) processes takes note of the fact that even though a particle or a system is swallowed by a black hole, the prior history of that paticle or system remains extant (except in the case of the "Big Crunch"). So both positions in the "black hole information war" may be correct - black holes do indeed destroy particular information systems, but those systems and the information they contain nevertheless survive (at least partially) in a real historical sense - if not as actual records, then as light visible to distant observers, and/or as influences and "karmic consequences" which propagate endlessly in causal chains and dendritic repercussions throughout spacetime.
This latter view is very similar to the "holographic boundary" vision of information conservation as put forward in Susskind's book. For example, light always travels in the "universal present moment", which forms the spacetime boundary of our universe - the outermost spatial line of the "Spacetime Map of the Universe". The boundary 2-D holgraphic surface which contains all the information necessary to reconstruct the "bulk" 3-D universe (including its historical development) is apparently stored in the 2-D light waves which propagate forever throughout the "universal present moment" of the cosmos. Hence there is no need to "rescue" Quantum Mechanics from a crisis caused by the destruction of information in black holes - the information lives on anyway in the causal history of spacetime and in the propagating light waves of the "universal present moment" of spacetime. (See: "A Spacetime Map of the Universe" (text).)
Reconstituting the original information from such historical records or from propagating causal effects or light rays is certainly no less improbable or challenging than decoding the hidden messages in Hawking radiation, as Susskind suggests is possible. Furthermore, if the holographic principle is true to the model, then only a fragment of the original hologram is necessary to reconstitute an image of the whole, and such fragments should be abundantly present in the historical record. For example, we have been able to reconstruct the age of the dinosaurs from fossils, the evolutionary history of the cosmos from starlight, and the ontogeny of humanity from DNA.
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(Revised Jan., 2011)
John A. Gowan
