Avi Loeb

And the problem is if you throw an encyclopedia into the black hole, and then the only thing you get out is thermal radiation that is characterized just by the temperature as a function of time.

And eventually the black hole shrinks and loses all of its mass to this radiation.

And it's basically an explosion.

It loses...

But it takes a long time for the astrophysical black holes.

If we had tiny black holes, the mass of asteroids, they would evaporate within the age of the universe.

We haven't seen any because maybe they were never produced in the universe, small ones.

But the point is, it creates a new headache for theoretical physicists because where did the information go to if the black hole evaporates

and we dumped information into it.

Is it recorded somewhere in the radiation or not?

And that's still being debated.

It's an unsolved problem, even with people that use string theory.

So we don't know if Hawking radiation exists because we haven't detected primordial black holes that are small enough to create it.

We haven't seen it.

Does the math allow for it?

Yeah.

It does.

This was your area of expertise, wasn't it?

Black holes?

You could imagine the early universe having inhomogeneities, meaning some regions that are much denser than average.