Click Here for Black paradox About the Game: Spiderweb of wormholes could solve a black hole paradox 1st proposed by Stephen Hawking | Space A seemingly intractable black hole paradox first proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking could finally be resolved &mdash, by wormholes through space-time. Spiderweb of wormholes could solve a black hole paradox 1st proposed by Stephen Hawking. The black hole information paradox was seemingly intractable. In this illustrative concept image, a black hole is sucking in all the nearby matter in space. (Image credit: Alberto Gagliardi/Getty Images) A seemingly intractable black hole paradox first proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking could finally be resolved — by wormholes through space-time (opens in new tab) . The black hole information paradox" refers to the fact that information cannot be destroyed in the universe, and yet when a black hole eventually evaporates, whatever information was gobbled up by this cosmic vacuum cleaner should have long since vanished. The new study proposes that the paradox could be resolved by nature's ultimate cheat code: wormholes , or passages through space-time. "A wormhole connects the interior of the black hole and the radiation outside, like a bridge," Kanato Goto, a theoretical physicist at the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program in Japan, said in a statement (opens in new tab) . Under Goto's theory, a second surface appears inside the event horizon of a black hole, the boundary beyond which nothing can escape. Threads from a wormhole connect that surface to the outside world, entangling information between the interior of the black hole and the radiation leaks at its edges. Black hole information paradox. In the 1970s, Hawking discovered that black holes aren't exactly black, but at first, he didn't realize the giant problem he had created. Before his discovery, physicists had assumed that black holes were exceedingly simple. Sure, all sorts of complicated stuff fell into them, but the black holes locked all that information away, never to be seen again. But Hawking found that black holes release radiation, and can eventually evaporate entirely (opens in new tab) , in a process now known as Hawking radiation But that radiation didn't carry any information itself. Indeed, it couldn't, by definition, the event horizon of a black hole prevents information from leaving. So, when a black hole finally evaporates and disappears from the universe, where did all its locked-up information go? This is the black hole information paradox. One possibility is that information can be destroyed, which seems to violate everything we know about physics. (For instance, if information can be lost, then you can't reconstruct the past from present events, or predict future events.) Instead, most physicists try to solve the paradox by finding some way — any way — for the information inside the black hole to leak out through the Hawking radiation. That way, when the black hole disappears, the information is still present in the universe. Either way, describing this process requires new physics. "This suggests that general relativity and quantum mechanics (opens in new tab) as they currently stand are inconsistent with each other," Goto said. "We have to find a unified framework for quantum gravity ." A tale of two entropies. In 1992, physicist Don Page, a former graduate student of Hawking, viewed the information paradox problem another way. He started by looking at quantum entanglement , which is when distant particles have their fates linked. This entanglement acts as the quantum mechanical connection between the Hawking radiation and the black hole itself. Page measured the amount of entanglement by calculating the "entanglement entropy," which is a measure of the amount of information contained in the entangled Hawking radiation. In Hawking's original calculation, no information escapes, and the entanglement entropy always increases until the black hole finally disappears.
