I know this is off topic, but as an astrophysicist I can't let it lie.
First off, Black holes are singularities or points and have no volumes.
Black Hole refers to the event horizon, the geometry is not nice inside that.
Second, the 'surface' of the event horizon is a fractal and is therefore better represented by a volume.
The 'surface' is not fractal. It is a simple bounded spheroid of finite area.
Third, Black holes are not de-coupled from the rest of the universe, they emit 'Hawkings Radiation' which eventually leads to the evaporatio of every black hole, the bigger the faster.
Blackholes evaporate through Hawking radiation the SMALLER the faster. Stellar mass black holes will not evaporate in the age of the universe. This radiation does not carry information about the interior. It is formed from the quantum field just above the surface.
Fifth, volume is not an issue because several accepted theories imply a 'many worlds' type of reality. Some of these theories even allow a certain
amount of information to leak between them. This occurs because when the Hamiltonian is constructed some states prevent or exclude other states and the state space turns out to be smaller than at first apparent.
This is philosophy not physics.
Sixth, everyone (incl. me initialy) was discussing QED in exclusion. This is completely incorrect. You must include QCD and it is a complete unknown at this point. When QED succeded because of Feynmann the tools were applied to the Quantuam Chromodynamics of Quarks and it has not solved any problems.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
-------------------------------------------------- Lance Cottrell who does not speak for CASS/UCSD loki@nately.ucsd.edu PGP 2.3 key available by finger or server.
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night the ice weasels come." --Nietzsche
I appreciate your feedback. From what I have read of Hawkings and others work I would have to disagree w/ your statements that a black hole is equated w/ the event horizon. In every text (incl. the Hawkings book from the 70's on the subject) to makes a clear distinction. Several years ago (around '90) there was a whole raft of work dealing w/ the event horizon and the consensus that I got was that the event horizon was a fractal. Perhaps you would site some references where this theory is not accepted and a argumetn as to why it fails? What I am saying as far as QED/QCD is that w/o discussing both then the actions of electrons and photons are not quantum mechanical in the sense that they require statistical terms to describe their behaviour. Nowhere in Maxwells Equations is there a statistical term. If you know of a hole in the equations please let me know of it. I am not aware of any behaviour of electrons/photons which are not covered by these equations until hadrons are introduced.