Have We SOLVED The Black Hole Information Paradox with Wormholes?

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**Matt O'Dowd** (1:00)
Black holes are very real, but they're also a theoretical nightmare. It turns out that in order to make sense of their paradoxical nature, we need to consider that each real black hole has the potential to be connected to multiple imaginary black holes via wormholes. And you thought the universe couldn't get any weirder.
Some of the most profound leaps in our understanding of the universe have come when we noticed inconsequential seeming inconsistencies in our theories. The fact that Maxwell's electromagnetism didn't square with Galileo's relativity led Einstein to his special theory of relativity, from which followed our modern description of gravity, space and time in general relativity. Now there's an uncomfortable conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics when we try to describe the tiniest scales and the highest energies. This drives our quest for theories of everything. A quest that seems to have stalled after a century of work. But there is another less well-known glitch between GR and quantum theory that might provide a way forward. I'm talking about the black hole information paradox.
Efforts to resolve it have led to stunning realizations about the nature of entropy, quantum information and even to the holographic principle. Now the latest attempt to solve the black hole information paradox are pointing to a bizarre picture in which each black hole behaves like many parallel black holes connected by wormholes. Before we jump into this particular wormhole, let's remind ourselves of the black hole information paradox. Feel free to have a look at our original video on the paradox, but it's not essential for understanding this new angle.
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Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes aren't quite, well, as black and inescapable as we thought. They radiate, and this Hawking radiation causes them to slowly evaporate. But that means that all of the information that went into making the black hole is erased from the universe. This conflicts with the law of conservation of quantum information, which is a non-negotiable constraint of quantum mechanics. Perhaps the most powerful way to think about this paradox is in terms of entropy. Think of entropy as the amount of information hidden by a system, information not observable, in the system's gross properties. Black holes have huge entropy because every black hole looks the same, no matter how it formed. The quantum version of entropy is called von Neumann entropy. This is the entropy of entanglement. If two particles are entangled, then they share mysterious correlations. You can learn about and even influence the properties of one particle by measuring its entangled partner.
Some of the quantum information of each of the pair is stored in its partner. The von Neumann entropy of an entangled particle or system of particles is a measure of how much quantum information is not stored locally in the system, but rather in whatever it is entangled with. If you can entangle a particle, then you can entangle a black hole. One way to think about Hawking radiation is that the black hole is swallowing and emitting virtual particles. We can think about the vacuum of space as being filled with a boiling flux of particle-antiparticle pairs that constantly appear and annihilate each other. If these particles get separated by a black hole event horizon before they can annihilate, one particle escapes and becomes real, while the other is swallowed. But those virtual particle pairs are entangled, which means that Hawking radiation and the interior of the black hole are entangled. The black hole interior can...

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