30 years ago, some scientists postulated the idea that the universe was a hologram. Building on that theory, new research published by physicists suggests that the information stored in a black hole is 2-dimensional. Black holes emit some types of energy, as proved by later scientists, including Hawkings. Scientists Benini and Milan have worked to expound on the theories, but conclude that there is still much progress to be made in understanding black holes, and their impact on our visible universe.
Key Takeaways:
- So black holes must also have entropy—technically, a means of determining how many different ways you can rearrange the atoms of an object and still have it look pretty much the same.
- The holographic principle emerged from string theory as a proposed solution to this information paradox in the 1990s.
- Entropy counts the number of ways you can rearrange things, but in a black hole, it’s unclear what is actually being rearranged.
“All you need to describe them mathematically is their mass and their spin, plus their electric charge. So there would be no noticeable change if you threw something into a black hole—nothing that would provide a clue as to what that object might have been. That information is lost.”
