The Black Hole Information Paradox

We’ve established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information. Get your own Space Time t­-shirt at Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com Comment on Reddit: Help translate our videos! Previous Episode: Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed These ideas are pretty mind-blowing, but as crazy as black holes are, they’re also kind of … simple. Don’t get me wrong; the math is complicated. But the objects themselves are simple. In fact every black hole in the universe, no matter how it formed or what happened to it afterwards, can be perfectly described with only three properties. Those properties are mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. Or at least this is the proposition behind the famous no-hair conjecture, or no-hair theorem. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Grayson Blackmon Assistant Editing and Sound Design by Mike Petrow and Linda Huang Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com) Big Bang CoolAsCats David Nicklas Anton Lifshits Joey Redner Fabrice Eap Quasar Tambe Barsbay Mayank M. Mehrota Mars Yentur Mark Rosenthal Dean Fuqua Roman Pinchuk ColeslawPurdie Hypernova Edmund Fokschaner Matthew O’Connor Eugene Lawson Barry Hatfield Martha Hunt Joseph Salomone Chuck Zegar Craig Peterson Jordan Young Ratfeast John Hofmann James Hughes Fabian Olesen Kris Fernet Jane Meyers James Flowers Greg Allen Denys Ivanov Nick Virtue Alexey Eromenko Nicholas Rose Scott Gossett Mark Vasile Patrick Murray Sultan Alkhulaifi Alex Seto Michal-Peanut Karmi Erik Stein Kevin Warne JJ Bagnell Avi Goldfinger John Pettit Florian Stinglmayr Benoit Pagé-Guitard Nathan Leniz Brandon Labonte David Crane Greg Weiss Shannan Catalano Brandon Cook