Philosophers Debate New ‘Sonic Black Hole’ Discovery
Today’s physicists widely believe black hole information is preserved — that the quantum nature of gravity somehow modifies event horizons (and corrects Hawking’s calculation) in a way that encrypts the outgoing Hawking radiation with a record of the past. Hawking, in his calculation, glossed over the (unknown) microscopic properties of the space-time fabric at the event horizon, and Unruh likewise treated the fluid in a sonic black hole as smooth, ignoring its composite atoms. The philosophers concede that exotic possibilities for the quantum-scale properties of space-time “mute the strength” with which Steinhauer’s experiment makes black hole information loss more likely.
Source: www.quantamagazine.org