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For a half-century, scientists have investigated ways to solve the black hole information paradox—the idea that when black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, the information inside them disappears, violating the laws of quantum physics.A new study hypothesizes that extra dimensions in space-time can create a particular torsion field that prevents black holes from evaporating entirely, leaving behind a remnant that stores the missing information.Fingerprints of this torsion field geometry could be found throughout the cosmos, whether in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) or gravitational waves.
In the year ten thousand trillion trillion trillion or so, the universe will enter its “black hole” era—a bleak time when no other forms of matter exist except for the massive behemoths from which light cannot escape. But even these gargantuan monsters of the cosmos—after 10 duodecillion to one googol years after the Big Bang—will also succumb to time, evaporating into nothing due to the inexorable effects of Hawking radiation.
There’s just one problem—quantum physics tells us that information can’t be destroyed, so the question becomes: Where’s all the stuff that fell into those last, dark-eyed sentinels of existence? This conundrum is known as the “black hole information paradox,” and physicists have wrestled with this cosmic inconsistency for the last half-century since English astrophysicist Stephen Hawking first presented it. Scientists have come up with a menagerie of head-spinning solutions to the paradox, including everything from multiverses to simply denying that there’s a paradox at all (i.e. information can be destroyed).
Now, a new study published in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation adds a new, enticing hypothesis to this long list of ideas. Maybe, the authors argue, we just need a few more dimensions—three more to be precise.
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“We experience three dimensions of space and one of time—four dimensions in total,” study co-author Richard Pinčák, of the Slovak Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Experimental Physics, told Live Science. “Our model proposes that the universe actually has seven dimensions: the four we know, plus three tiny extra dimensions curled up so tightly that we cannot directly perceive them.”
In this hypothesis, these extra dimensions align in a torsion field (explaining how space-time can both curve and twist) produced by a structure known as a G2-manifold. When black holes reach the end of their lives, constantly leaking Hawking radiation over trillions of years, this torsion field, which is produced by the twisting geometry of space-time, essentially halts the process in its place. At this point, the black hole is remarkably small, roughly 10 billion times smaller than an electron, but the authors argue that’s still large enough to store indefinitely all the information that ever fell into the black hole (around 1.515 x 1077 qubits of information), which effectively solves the information paradox.
Interestingly, the theory also solves mass hierarchy problems in particle physics, since the same geometric property that saves these black holes from oblivion also helps to explain the origin of the electroweak scale.
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“The same torsion field…generates a potential energy landscape that is identical in form to the one responsible for giving mass to the W and Z bosons—the carriers of the weak nuclear force,” Pinčák told Live Science.
The one major problem with this hypothesis is that it’s not exactly easy to prove. As the authors state, particles associated with these possible dimensions contain energy levels eleven orders of magnitude higher than what CERN’s Large Hadron Collider can produce. However, it’s possible that these seven-dimensional geometries left a fingerprint in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), or that these stable black hole remnants could be identified via gravitational waves.
For now, this dimensional description for the black hole paradox is one among many—but maybe one day we’ll learn that the truth is more twisted that we ever knew.
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.