Let’s see where this one leads:
Then, two years ago, Remmen and collaborators Clifford Cheung and Junyu Liu of the California Institute of Technology discovered that whether extremal black holes can decay depends directly on another key property of black holes: their entropy — a measure of how many different ways an object’s constituent parts can be rearranged. Entropy is one of the most studied features of black holes, but it wasn’t thought to have anything to do with their extremal limit. “It’s like, wow, OK, two very cool things are connected,” Cheung said.
In the latest surprise, that link turns out to exemplify a general fact about nature. In a paper published in March in Physical Review Letters, Goon and Riccardo Penco broadened the lessons of the earlier work by proving a simple, universal formula relating energy and entropy. The newfound formula applies to a system such as a gas as well as a black hole.
Natalie Wolchover, “Black Hole Paradoxes Reveal a Fundamental Link Between Energy and Order” at Quanta