Conservation Of Information?
Posting again on a subject I don't understand and never will: what physicists mean by "information." My brain balks at mathematical symbols, but I'm good at concepts; so my guess is that if some articulate physicist were to wander by, he or she could explain "conservation of information" in a way that doesn't totally leave me at sea. Wikipedia hasn
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Anti de Sitter space... is like a can of soup. Horizontal slices through the can represent space; the vertical axis of the can is time. The label on the outside of the can is the boundary, and the interior is the space-time continuum itself.
...Witten explained that by injecting enough mass and energy into the can, a black hole could be created. That raised a question. According to Maldacena, there must be a second description - a dual description - that makes no reference to the inside of the can. The alternate description would be in terms of a two-dimensional Quantum Field Theory of particles similar to gluons that move on the label. The existence of a black hole in the soup must be equivalent to something in the boundary hologram, but what was that something? In the Boundary Theory, Witten argued that the black hole in the soup was equivalent to an ordinary hot fluid of elementary particles - basically just gluons.
If I'm understanding this, we're taking a description of something that includes gravity (and hence black holes) and creating an exactly equivalent description that subtracts a dimension and gets rid of gravity, therefore gets rid of black holes, while retaining the information that was poured into the black hole in the previous description. If I've got that right.
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