© iStockphotoConventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but a new study suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.
New research by scientists at the University of York gives a fresh perspective on the physics of black holes. Black holes are objects in space that are so massive and compact they were described by Einstein as "bending" space. Conventional thinking asserts that black holes swallow everything that gets too close and that nothing can escape, but the study by Prof. Samuel Braunstein and Dr. Manas Patra suggests that information could escape from black holes after all.
The implications could be revolutionary, suggesting that gravity may not be a fundamental force of nature.
Prof. Braunstein says: "Our results didn't need the details of a black hole's curved space geometry. That lends support to recent proposals that space, time and even gravity itself may be emergent properties within a deeper theory. Our work subtly changes those proposals, by identifying quantum information theory as the likely candidate for the source of an emergent theory of gravity."
But quantum mechanics is the theory of light and atoms, and many physicists are skeptical that it could be used to explain the slow evaporation of black holes without incorporating the effects of gravity.
The research, which appears in the latest issue of
Physical Review Letters, uses the basic tenets of quantum mechanics to give a new description of information leaking from a black hole.
