nobody seems to mention the entropy carried by the radiation released during accretion
The entropy of the collapsing object jumps enormously once the event horizon forms. Any entropy lost before that is just a detail.
OK, that’s the part that gives me trouble. Could you point me towards something with more details about this jump? That is, how it was deduced that the entropy rises, that it is big rise, and that the radiation before it is negligible? An explanation would be nice (something like a manual), but even a technical paper will probably help me a lot (at least to learn what questions to ask). A list of a dozen incremental results—which is all I could find with my limited technical vocabulary—would help much less, I don’t think I could follow the implications between them well enough.
The conclusion comes from combining a standard entropy calculation for a star, and a standard entropy calculation for a black hole. I can't find a good example where they are worked through together, but the last page here provides an example. Treat the sun as an ideal gas, and its entropy is proportional to the number of particles, so it's ~ 10^57. Entropy of a solar-mass black hole is the square of solar mass in units of Planck mass, so it's ~ 10^76. So when a star becomes a black hole, its entropy jumps by about 10^20.
What's lacking is a common theoret...
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.