Abstract:
Stephen Hawking proposed that the formation of a black hole and its subsequent evaporation by the Hawking radiation he discovered would lose information in the sense of converting a pure quantum state to a mixed state with increased von Neumann entropy. Here I wish to summarize some of the arguments for and against information loss and discuss the puzzles that remain.
Brief Bio:
Prof. Donald Nelson Page is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada. He got his BA at William Jewell College in the United States in 1971, attaining an MS in 1972 and a PhD in 1976 at Caltech. His professional career started as a research assistant in Cambridge from 1976-1979, followed by an assistant professorship at Penn State from 1979 to 1983, and then an associate professor at Penn State until 1986 before taking on the title of professor in 1986. Page spent four more years at Penn State before moving to become a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada in 1990. His work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of the eminent Professor Stephen Hawking, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him.