Registered: Aug 2003
Posts: 712

There is an interesting recent paper from physicist G. Hooft ( http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/ ) on information loss in black holes and what it may tell us about quantum gravity, that I thought might interest some on the forum. It refers to NKS in passing when discussing possible ways of modeling information loss. The paper's title is "Horizons", because it focuses on black hole horizons. My own pull quote from late in the article would be -

"Now the most likely way this problem can perhaps be addressed is to assume not only deterministic evolution, but also local information loss." Italics in original. There is considerably more in the paper, which is linked below in PDF.

Abstract: The gravitational force harbours a fundamental instability against collapse. In standard General Relativity without Quantum Mechanics, this implies the existence of black holes as natural, stable solutions of Einstein's equations. If one attempts to quantize the gravitational force, one should also consider the question how Quantum Mechanics affects the behaviour of black holes. In this lecture, we concentrate on the horizon. One would have expected that its properties could be derived from general coordinate transformations out of a vacuum state. In contrast, it appears that much new physics is needed. Much of that is still poorly understood, but one may speculate on the way information is organized at a horizon, and how refined versions of Quantum Theory may lead to answers.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0401/0401027.pdf

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