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What's new about Hawking's theories in relation to 't Hooft's about resolving the black hole information paradox? Thanks

"The information is stored in a super translation of the horizon that the ingoing particles [from the source star] cause," he explained, for those of you who like a little more physics lingo. "The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. For all practical purposes the info is lost."

Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft, who was present for the discussion, has been thinking about information loss in a similar way, and he cited several papers he has published on the subject. It will take more discussion — and much comparing of math equations — to establish what's new about Hawking's theories in relation to 't Hooft's, and whether Hawking has overcome some of the issues associated with earlier iterations of the idea. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/08/25/stephen-hawking-believes-hes-solved-a-huge-mystery-about-black-holes/?tid=sm_tw

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  • $\begingroup$ lol, journalist at the Washington Post aren't capable of writing correctly the name of Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ap.html $\endgroup$
    – Bosoneando
    Commented Jul 8, 2016 at 12:40
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    $\begingroup$ @Bosoneando not that it matters, really, but I think the convention when you're quoting text is to leave intact any typos or errors in the original text, perhaps marking them with "[sic]" to indicate that you (the quoter) didn't introduce the error yourself. Of course you're right that the WP people should have checked that more carefully. $\endgroup$
    – David Z
    Commented Jul 8, 2016 at 12:44

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First of all, let me point out that the supertraslation proposal to solve the paradox is not due to Hawking. Is due to Hawking, Perry and Strominger and is based on previous works of Strominger and collaborators. Unfortunately this habit of giving too much merit to very well know people is very common, especially from mass media.

The supertraslation proposal and the holographic principle are mainly unrelated. The first basically says that a subtle asymptotic symmetry of classical general relativity can account for the microstates of the black holes, once the quantum picture (of a not well specified quantum gravity theory) is taken into account. More precisely, every microstates differ from another for a certain amount of soft gravitons, that can be seen as the Goldstone bosons of the broken symmetry. Concretely the information is stored outside of the hole, due to gravitational memory effect.

The holographic principle in a nutshell says that the information of a space can be encoded in another space of one dimension less. The most concrete realization is AdS/CFT in which the bulk gravity theory in D dimensions is conjectured to be dual to the D-1 Conformal field theory on the boundary. The information paradox is solved by noticing that since the CFT is unitary, so must be gravity and all the process in the theory, like black hole formation and evaporation. Of course this is tautological, and indeed in order to really solve the paradox one should describe all the process in detail, not just giving general arguments of plausibility.

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