Simon Fraser University
SFU Cosmology Seminars

For seminars and other local announcements, please subscribe to sfu-cosmo mailing list.


Friday, 3 October 2014, 14:30 in AQ3005

Prof. Gabor Kunstatter (University of Winnipeg)

The black hole information loss problem: Is there light at the end of the tunnel? (physics colloquium)

There is substantial evidence that black holes exist in binary star systems and at the center of most galaxies, including our own. Hawking's famous calculation of the mid 1970's proved that black holes evaporate by emitting radiation that does not contain any information about the state of the matter that formed the black hole. This leads to one of the deepest conundra of modern theoretical physics: what happens to this information once the evaporation is complete? Is it lost forever to the outside world or does it somehow emerge at the final stages of evaporation?

After a brief review of black holes and the evidence for their existence, I will describe in more detail the nature of the black hole information loss paradox. I will then list several proposed resolutions. Finally I will offer a different, more mundane solution to the problem based on the fact that the singularity which is thought to lurk at the center of all black holes and lies at the heart of the conundrum cannot be realized in nature. I will use a simple phenomenological model to argue that taming the singularity resolves the conundrum by allowing the information to emerge at the end of the evaporation process.


Seminars in 2014:

2014-09-03 16:15 in P8445A - Yin-Zhe Ma (UBC): Searching for missing baryons
2014-10-02 16:00 in P8445A - Gabor Kunstatter (University of Winnipeg): The stability of AdS spacetime in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity
2014-10-03 14:30 in AQ3005 - Gabor Kunstatter (University of Winnipeg): The black hole information loss problem: Is there light at the end of the tunnel? (physics colloquium)
2014-10-23 16:00 in P8445A - Yuting Wang (NAOC Beijing): Cosmological forecasts for galaxy surveys using multi-tracer techniques
2014-10-30 16:00 in P8445A - Yun Li (SFU): Primordial magnetic fields
2014-11-06 16:00 in P8445A - Tomas Galvez (SFU): Bimetric models of gravity and cosmology in the early universe
2014-11-20 16:00 in P8445A - Micah Brush (SFU): 3D cosmological observables in spherical coordinates
2015-01-12 12:00 in P8445B - Misao Sasaki (YITP, Kyoto University): Reviving open inflation
2015-01-20 15:30 in P8445B - Alessandra Silvestri (Lorentz Institute, Leiden): Testing gravity within the EFT framework of cosmic acceleration
2015-01-26 12:00 in P8445B - Gong-Bo Zhao (NAOC, Beijing and ICG, Portsmouth): Cosmological tests of gravity
2015-03-05 14:00 in P8445A - Scott Chapman (Dalhousie University): Studying the epoch of inflation with the cosmic microwave background

[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]


Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01