Welcome to my blog wonderful Steemians. Today I will continue my write up on the universe. Recently my curiosity grew and I made it a duty to research and read more about the universe and that is what I am sharing with you. I hope you find it useful. To know how it all began and it will possibly end, it is necessary that we understand the composition and structure of the universe. Okay then, let’s get right to it, shall we?
WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?
Black holes are sphere (black sphere). Black holes are one of the strangest things to exist in the universe. They have the ability to rip anything off to as small as sub-atom particles, no matter how big the object is, be it a star or other celestial bodies. It is also believe that black hole might eventually cause the universe to disappear by “swallowing” it up.
HOW IS A BLACK HOLE FORMED?
A black hole is formed when a huge amount of matter is clustered together and concentrated in a tiny space such that the gravity at the center is very strong. The scrap of a large star that dies in a supernova explosion leads to the formation of a black hole. If any object/body gets too close, they are ripped off into their elementary particles.
A black hole has an outer border called the event horizon. Once anything crosses its event horizon, it has reached a point of no return. The gravity becomes so strong that the object has no control over its movement and it sinks deeper into the black hole.
The event horizon is a unique feature of black holes. No one knows what is really going on inside a black hole (No one has been there I believe, but if possibly someone has gone there, the person is yet to return). What we can say much about is what goes on around its edges. Event light cannot escape black hole!
Black hole slowly and continuously radiates their mass away. Take as an example, hot boiling pot of water where the water is being lost as steam to the atmosphere. There you have a depiction of what happens. This radiation is known as Hawking radiation. It happens so slowly such that it will take billions of billions of years for the smallest black hole to lose a tiny fraction of its mass through Hawking radiation, long after the universe would have ended. Black holes will then become tinier and tinier and eventually disappear leaving behind little radiation.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INFORMATION CARRIED BY A BODY SUCKED IN BY A BLACK HOLE?
The fundamental building block of anything in the universe is the same. Meaning that everything is composed of the same thing. It’s like raw data. It now depends on how you arrange these particles that will determine what you will get. If arranged in a certain way, you could get gold, in another way; you could get a tree or perhaps a rat. It is this arrangement that is called information. So everything in the universe has unique information embedded in them. If it was arranged in the same way, everything in the universe will look the same and have the same structure. If you have ever done organic chemistry, you would recall that the arrangement of carbon atoms in an organic compound will determine its properties. Compound might have the same formula but different atomic structure and so is their property.
According to quantum mechanics, information cannot be destroyed! It is indestructible. What that means is that you can only change its shape from one form to another. This is similar to the law of conservation of energy i.e. energy cannot be destroyed.
Theoretically, if you burn a piece of wood and do not allow anything to escape i.e. the smoke, the sooth…during the process, you can still get the information in the wood, just that now it has become hard to read. In the same way, if one can track all the radiation, particles and atoms in the universe, we can trace the history of the universe to its very beginning-the big bang.
What black holes do actually is to take different things in the universe and make them into the same thing-your guess is as good as mine, information embedded in these things has been destroyed. This leads to information paradox.
INFORMATION PARADOX
By perceived to be destroying information, black hole is creating a serious problem. It is important to all our laws of physics that information should never be lost. Or it will be that even the fact that you exist becomes relative, and you cannot be sure.
How do we resolve this? There are a number of plausible explanations to this.
Firstly, we could conclude that information is lost. If so, it then means that all our laws of physics are no longer valid and we need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again. Everything we then claim to know now is not what we thought they are. This makes you want to freak out right?
Secondly, information may not be lost but hidden. If you believe in the theory of multiverse, that is, our universe is one of many universes and this goes to say that more universes are still being formed. Then it is possible that a part of the black hole breaks away to form a baby universe that we cannot see or observe, where the information that is being sucked in by the black hole is transferred into. This way, the information is not lost.
Black holes might not disappear completely at the end of its life cycle, but leaves behind a precious information arrangement.
Thirdly, Information may not be lost or hidden, but safe. We can view a black hole like a hard drive with infinite capacity. What this means is that the more things you throw into it, the more its surface area increases to accommodate new set of information. Because it is super-saturated, we can only notice the entrance of stuffs into its surface but cannot see it. In other words, it can be imagined like taking a book and turning into an e-book. The content has not changed but the format has changed.
So it’s like a black holes swallows up stars and planet and changed them into another format. This is known as the holographic principle. Again, if this happens to be true, then all we think we know about the universe is wrong! Then it will be plausible to say that the universe is a hologram.
Therefore, if information is stored at the boundary of a black hole, the Hawking radiation emanating from there has the ability to learn about this information and then carry it way. So, the information paradox is resolved, and our law of physics as we know then stays intact. However, we might have to change our perspective of what reality is. A hologram is a flat surface. So if any three dimensional object is sucked in by a black hole, it is flattened out as viewed from the outside. This sound confusing. If the duality between 2D and 3D holds in the black hole, then it could be that it holds for the universe and everything in it. Since the person inside a black hole will not realized he is stretched over a flat surface, we all might be stretched over a flat screen at the end of the universe. The consequence of this is that we will have to change our perspective of reality as we know it now. This appear to be creepy and complicated.
CONCLUSION
There are still a lot begging for answers in respect to the nature, composition and structure of the universe. The science behind the universe still has a lot yet to be elucidated. However, for us to fully understand the universe, we need to fully understand dark matter and energy, black holes and the big bang theory. We need to go back to the beginning of the universe and trace its emergence in time up to this present time you are reading this.
References:
What is a black hole
Black Holes: Facts, Theory & Definition
Black hole could delete the universe
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