I think that you are possibly confusing two different articles Tommy. The one on
simulation of black holes uses computers in the same way that other simulation programs run. Think about weather prediction or f@h and just use the math that has been developed for black holes and you should get that idea.
The one that you read about black holes working as computers was a bit different. That article drew on some of the newer parts of information theory. You could try searching for ?holographic universe? if you want to bake your brain.
There is a simpler way of looking at it. Remember the Matrix (the first one -- not the sequels)? Now let me suggest that it doesn't really matter if we are in the matrix or not. In fact, given a good enough simulation, it should be impossible to prove whether we are in the matrix or outside of it.
Everything that we see and feel can be represented as information. Is the steak you are eating tender and juicy or is it a pattern of information? Even if you are not in the matrix, there is a sense in which the tender juicy steak is information in your brain. Put another way, when you fold, you are moving information around in your processor but in theory it should be identical to the way proteins fold in the real world. A fully folded protein molecule contains the same information that the simulated one had in your proc. Granted the one in your proc could not play a role in the human body but that is rather unimportant to information theory. What matters is that a simulated protein should be essentially identical to a real one.
Now if I throw an alarm clock into a black hole, it is destroyed right? In the sense that it has been ripped apart by tidal forces, yes it has. But we did not just throw a huge pile of quarks into the black hole but rather a highly organized bunch of quarks. They were in fact arranged in such a way as to be called an alarm clock. Yes, the quarks got ripped apart but the information (about how to make an alarm clock) also fell into the black hole.
Have I lost you yet? I hope not because we are finally getting to the computer analogy.
Black holes are not really black but rather a very dark gray. They leak stuff through a process called ?Hawking radiation?. Stuff goes in and stuff comes out. For stellar mass black holes, stuff leaks very slowly. But for really tiny black holes like the one they are trying to make at CERN, they leak so fast that they will evaporate before the containment vessel can collapse (and that goodness for that
).
Now the thing is that if a black hole can leak out completely, then what of the information that originally fell into it? If a black hole eventually ceases to exist, then it follows that the information had to come out of it at the same time as the stuff that carried the information into the black hole in the first place.
Granted, it came out as Hawking radiation but it still exists in some form. The situation can be analogized by considering how my understanding of the article became the motion of my fingers on my keyboard >>> then it became binary code in my proc >>> then it was sent over many miles of copper, fiber and possibly a hop through a satellite and eventually appeared on your screen and into your brain. Of course those pathways are far better understood. Yet if some sense could be made of the pathways of information flow through a black hole, it ought to be possible to reconstruct the alarm clock that we tossed into the black hole earlier.
So information goes into a black hole, gets tossed around in some way and comes out differently. In a sense, that is what a computer does. That does not mean that we are going to be using black holes in our computers any time in the foreseeable future. Nor does it mean that black holes are hackable. In theory, yes that is all possible but then lots of things are possible in theory.
