This is a post about the recent popular media coverage of the black hole information paradox. It is a post that I would have preferred not to make. However, I care about public outreach of science and I think that when scientists engage in outreach, they have some responsibilities. These include not misleading people, not making overblown claims, and not claiming credit for the work of others.
I understand that outreach is difficult, and it is sometimes difficult to avoid oversimplifying issues. But, in the recent stories, I see absolutely no effort to uphold these principles. Given this, I think it is important for other scientists to call this out.
Second, I think this incident provides some interesting insights into how the media operates. Some of the media organizations involved in promoting this story — the BBC, the Guardian, Newsweek and others — claim to be the source of “trusted news”. The story I am about to relate below might help to evaluate this claim.
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In October last year, Calmet et al. published a paper arguing for the failure of the no-hair theorem due to quantum effects. The result is not new: it has been known to those who think about quantum aspects of black holes for several years. For instance, see this review I wrote in 2020: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05770.pdf where I stated “if one attempts to use the classical [no-hair] theorem, unchanged, in quantum mechanics, then the theorem is clearly wrong.”
Calmet et al. used different techniques to study the field of two spherically symetric balls of matter and showed that this depends on more than the mass. The results of Calmet et al. do not directly address the information paradox. As Daniel Harlow emphasized in a recent discussion, just knowing the energy cannot even be used to distinguish between pure and mixed states (eg. a|E_1> + b |E_2> cannot be distinguished from |a|^2 |E_1><|E_1| + |b|^2 |E_2><E_2|).
To be clear: it has been my position for a few years (which not everyone agrees with) that the information paradox can be resolved by replacing the no-hair theorem by a principle of holography of information. This is the result, which we have developed with several collaborators that, in an appropriate UV-completion of gravity, all the information inside the black hole is available outside, which is very different from the no-hair theorem.
But the results of Calmet et al. do not establish such a principle and should not be conflated with our results. They only establish a more-limited result: that some information is available outside.
To summarize: this paper is a reasonable incremental advance that provides a supporting calculation for an existing perspective. The result is not unexpected, and was known earlier, although the authors developed new techniques that are of interest.
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A couple of weeks ago, the University of Sussex, which is the home institution for two of the authors of the paper above, decided to go on a publicity blitz. The blitz was timed with the journal-publication of this paper and a companion paper (in PLB and PRL). Journal publication means very little in hep-th, but journalists don’t know this and think of “peer-review” as some mystical magical process.
I first learned of the U. Sussex publicity stunt when I was contacted by the BBC asking for comments on a study “which claims to resolve the Hawking paradox.” I was quite puzzled about what the BBC was talking about, but after some back and forth, I was given a copy of the actual press-release from U. Sussex and the paper from October 21.
The press release skipped over the state of the scientific field and claimed a dramatic result well in excess of what was claimed in the paper itself.
I tried to be positive about the paper. But I kept pointing out to the BBC that this work didn’t represent a fundamentally new perspective. However, the BBC kept pressing me for a quote that would fit their story. The final quote they used came from this exchange:
====== BBC: Does this resolve the information paradox?
Reply:
I think this insight — the failure of the no hair theorem — does resolve the information paradox as it was formulated by Hawking.
However, it would be demonstrably incorrect to attribute this insight to the recent work of Calmet et al.
I think the correct and verifiable statement is that “in the past few years, it has been recognized that the no hair theorem fails due to quantum effects and this resolves Hawking’s paradox.”
The recent paper provides additional evidence for the failure of the no-hair theorem when quantum mechanical effects are included.
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Some word of this got back to the authors. So, a day later, I received a nice email from one of the (non-Sussex) authors who explained that I shouldn’t take the U. Sussex PR department too seriously since they were just “doing their job” and getting the science right was “only secondary” in this job. I largely forgot about the matter, and assumed that now that the BBC had been pointed in the right direction, they would ignore the U. Sussex PR machine, do their own research and write some kind of a balanced popular science article on a better understanding of quantum information in quantum gravity.
How naive! A few days later, the following BBC story appeared. You can read it for yourself here and form an opinion. Note also the truncaton of my quote. (more on this below). https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60708711
The U. Sussex pitch to BBC offered it an “exclusive”. But similar stories soon appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mail and several other British media outlets. From there, it was picked up by media outlets across the world. Even our own News 18 in Hindi. A Google news search will reveal hundreds of similar stories.
As far as I can see, the authors have made no attempt to correct this overblown coverage.
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- A uniform characteristic of all these stories is that they almost entirely conform to the University press release and at most have a single external quote for form. How do science journalists make an assessment of the quality or importance of the work? For instance, the BBC decided the Calmet et al. paper was “revolutionary”. But I am the only external scientist quoted in the story. My opinion was the one given above. So how did the BBC reach this conclusion? Do they have in-house experts on quantum aspects of black holes who assessed the paper for them?
Same question for the Guardian — the supposedly sober representative of establishment British journalism. It decided that this might possibly represent a “momentous advance.” (See: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/17/quantum-hair-could-resolve-stephen-hawking-black-hole-paradox-say-scientists) ) But the sole external scientist quoted is Toby Wiseman who correctly expressed skepticism about the paper. So how did the Guardian arrive at this assessment?
Some news organizations, like the Daily Mail decided to dispense with the external expert entirely! So do they usually believe whatever a PR agency tells them, without even bothering to ask even one neutral knowledgeable person?
I think this is important for reasons that go beyond this story. Why should these news organizations be trusted to perform “fact checks” and weed out “fake news” that they keep complaining about, if this is how they do their job in relatively objective areas like physics.
As far as I can see, they decided to simply blindly trust the University press release because the University was British. (I bet they wouldn’t have published anything if more established researchers on the information paradox geographically based outside Western Europe or the United States had sent this story to them.)
Given this touching faith of the British mainstream media in British institutions, is it surprising that they swallowed — hook, line and sinker — stories about WMDs when the British government told them about it?
Another problem is that these news outlets have more credibility than they deserve. So once they publish something, news outlets in other parts of the world follow their lead. Obviously, this is a serious and broader problem.
- Are the science journalists at these organizations trained in doing basic literature searches? As of 25 March, Inspire-HEP shows that this paper has zero published citations, once self-citations are excluded.
To be clear: citations are a very flawed measure and I believe they are influenced by all sorts of non-scientific factors. They largely reflect networks of scientists citing each other and so it may well happen that papers with few citations are important.
But, even then, didn’t “zero citations in five months” send up some red flags for journalists? It means that the paper hasn’t created any immediate splash in the community that works on the subject. Shouldn’t this have encouraged some due diligence?
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Are science journalists at these organizations trained to check if scientists are claiming novelty where it doesn’t exist? A simple Google scholar search would have revealed that failure of the no-hair theorem and its implications for the information paradox has been investigated in print well before this paper. For instance a Google scholar search with keywords “no hair theorem, quantum mechanics, information paradox” will throw up the review above. So even a small amount of research should have been sufficient, even for non-specialists to recognize that the perspective of Calmet et al. is not fundamentally new.
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Do science journalists who write such stories even bother to read the paper they are reporting on and see if it conforms to the news release? In this case, the scientific paper itself doesn’t make the claims that the press-release does. Are the journalists aware of the following two-step possibility: (a) scientists write a paper and get it published (b) they issue a press-release that notionally refers to the paper, but actually has little to do with the contents of the paper.
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Obviously, experts in the subject are uniformly amused at these articles. Within this small community, these news articles don’t do the authors any good. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that these stories don’t matter. They are read by our colleagues in adjacent offices who work in related areas. They are read by undergraduate and graduate students who make career-decisions based on them. So what should be done to counter this?
Many of us are wary of aggressive publicity of this kind since it is hard to do good outreach without misleading people. But this just leaves the door open to disigenuous media-blitzes of the kind above that do a significant amount of harm.