From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Nov 17 2000 - 23:53:40 MST
Spudboy100@aol.com writes:
> anyway, there was this SciAm article by a
> few years ago that provoked me into looking for any info on this weird
> conjecture.
> ...
> The article dealt with a mythological court case in which
> one physicist's recipe for Hungarian goulash was cruelly, tossed into a black
> hole. The judge in the case eventually ruled that the recipe was not lost
> eternally, but could be theoretically recovered by extraordinary, but
> "normal" means.
As I understand the Schwartzchild geometry, a little while after an object
has been tossed into a black hole, it is unrecoverable. Attempts to swoop
down and retrieve it, or even to shine a light beam onto it, won't work.
The object will hit the singularity before even a light beam can reach it.
I know some people have postulated that the Hawking radiation which
will be eventually emitted when the black hole evaporates is not random.
It will somehow be subtly influenced by the contents of the black hole,
so that the information in the recipe will still be represented in the
details of the radiation that is emitted. However this view is not very
widely accepted, as far as I know.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:32:01 MST