Just watched "The Hawking Paradox" and then realised that I'd seen it before on SBS about a year or so ago (or it might have been the ABC).
Good show though.
Got me thinking.....information can't be lost when it enters a black hole, otherwise Hawking Radiation wouldn't exist. Here's why....3rd Law of Thermodynamics.....entropy. Any system will always tend towards a maximum state of entropy, disorder, over time. Now, black holes themselves you might think are a state of maximum entropy. They're not. I'd contend that given their characteristics they're actually probably as close to an ideally ordered state as you can get. Infinite gravitational pull, infinite density, zero size. A highly disordered state would, by necessity, be none of these because to be disordered implies having no characteristics to speak of at all. So, the production of virtual particle pairs at the event horizon of a black hole, where one escapes and one falls in, is in fact not a loss of information but a gain, as one of the particles manages to escape the clutches of the hole. Eventually what goes in comes out, but not in the way you might think :-). The hole then keeps evolving in this way till it reaches a point where it can no longer sustain its event horizon, so it breaks down and quantum fields come into play....the hole explodes in a burst of high energy gamma rays and disappears. This is where the talk of multiverses and such comes into play. It's all to do with entropy and the preservation of information, but in what I believe is a direct violation of the 3rd Law as we know it, because ordinarily entropy destroys information. However I feel that the wacky nature of reality that dominates Quantum Theory preserves the information in uncertainty.... that the randomness of the quantum is also underlain by an atypical and quirky type of order. This is where the "information" that a black hole swallows eventually goes to.
Now, the only thing is to try and prove it!!!!. I only wish my maths was good enough
