Comment by steveb: There is a school of thought in modern physics that information is never truly destroyed. Actually, it is more than a school of thought because it is the primary school of thought and all firmly accepted fundamental physics theory is founded on information preserving principles. There are of course practical issues in trying to recover information, but this is a different issue entirely.
It must be remembered that we often use black box models and statistical techniques to deal with very hard problems, and hence much practical theory seems to show that information is destroyed. However, this is an illusion, and if more fundamental theory is used, this fact can be shown. This concept was brought to the forefront in the famous long term debate/battle between Hawking and Susskind about black holes. The present view is that Susskind has won and information is not even destroyed by a black hole, which was previously thought to be true by Hawking. Hawking claimed to have proved that Black holes are the the one thing that can and do destroy information. After the long battle, Hawking conceded he was wrong. Speaking out against Hawking's statement that he proved that black holes destroy information, Prof. Leonard Susskind commented, "It violates one of the fundamental principles of physics, which says nothing is ever lost completely. You may say, "How can you say information isn't lost? I can erase information on my computer." But every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form." The following reference says, "During this discussion Stephen Hawking stated that the information inside a black hole is lost forever as the black hole evaporates. It took 28 years for Leonard Susskind to formulate his theory that would prove Hawking wrong." from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind / steveb / __________________ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
