Black Hole Computers

Interesting article in last month's edition of Scientific American about Black Hole Computers. I have the hard copy edition of SA, so I can read the entire article. You can read the beginning of the article online but then you have to subscribe to the Digital Edition to read it in its entirety.

According to classical Black Hole Theory (developed by Stephen Hawking and others), anything that enters a black hole is smashed to smithereens. Nothing can escape, not even light. Hawking later revised the theory to account for radiation that does escape, but according to the revision, the radiation is dispersed randomly.

The new theory states that the radiation has encoded information, which is anything but random. The capacity to store and process information, which any unit of matter is capable of, is inherent in the black hole itself. The idea is that if matter containing ordered instruction sets and data is propelled into the black hole, the intense gravitational force causing the collapse of matter will create basic particle collisions, whose scattering velocities and dispersions will result in information sequences. This information will be contained in the radiation escaping from the black hole.

There's some interesting quantum theory applied to black holes that makes the black hole computer theory plausible. The particle collisions triggered by the gravitational collapse in the black hole operate upon the input data & instruction sets described above. Particles have the ability to store bits of information with their spin state. There are two states: left-spin can store one binary bit (say a '1'), right-spin another (say a '0'). Computations occur when the particles "flip over". The resulting arrangement of these flip-overs is the solution to a given problem.

The answer then is "blowing in the wind", awaiting detection.