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Hawking argues that information is destroyed

In a Physical Review D paper on the breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse, Hawking drew out the consequence of his own 1974 result: because the emitted radiation is thermal and depends only on mass, spin and charge, the correlations that would let the initial state be reconstructed do not survive evaporation. That conflicts with the unitarity of quantum mechanics. The paper converted black holes from an astrophysical topic into a foundational problem in physics, and the conflict it identified has not been resolved.

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Recorded on The black hole information paradox

  1. Kerr finds the rotating solution
  2. Hawking shows that black holes radiate
  3. Hawking argues that information is destroyed
  4. Page states what unitarity requires of the radiation
  5. Hawking concedes the information bet
  6. GW150914 - two black holes merge and the signal reaches Earth
  7. The Page curve is reproduced from within semiclassical gravity

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