July 16, 2004
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE RECOVERY:
Steven Hawking: I was wrong (news.com.au, July 16, 2004)
AFTER almost 30 years of arguing that a black hole swallows up everything that falls into it, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking did a scientific back-flip today.The world famous author of a Brief History of Time said he and other scientists had got it wrong - the galactic traps may in fact allow information to escape.
"I've been thinking about this problem for the last 30 years, and I think I now have the answer to it," Mr Hawking told the BBC Newsnight program.
"A black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell inside. So we can be sure of the past and predict the future," he said.
The findings, which Mr Hawking is due to present at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin on July 21, could help solve the "black hole information paradox", which is a crucial puzzle of modern physics. [...]
According to current theory, Hawking radiation contains no information about the matter inside a black hole, and once the black hole has evaporated, all the information within it is lost.
However this conflicts with a central tenet of quantum physics, which says that such information can never be completely wiped out.
Mr Hawking said that the recapturing the information had important philosophical and practical consequences. [...]
If Mr Hawking succeeds in making his case, he will lose a bet that he and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) made with John Preskill, also of Caltech.
The terms of the bet were that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden and can never be revealed". Mr Preskill bet against that theory.
The forfeit is an encyclopaedia, from which Mr Preskill can recover information at will.
It's one of those dead-end theories that could easily have been avoided by reference to faith--our souls, which are essentially information, are permanent, so the odds against information being unrecoverable have to be pretty bad. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2004 7:07 PM
What single bit of information have we ever recovered from a soul that was not at that moment ensconced in an active body?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 16, 2004 8:08 PMI have to go with Mr. Eager on this one. Even if one grants the existence of souls, it doesn't mean that the information contained in one is equivalent to the information at the heart of this issue.
I also note that essence of true science, here, where Hawking is proving his critics' case, because that's where his work took him.
AOG:
I would contend that all this proves is that nobody knows what they are talking about -- Mr. Hawking was convinced one thing was true and is now equally convinced of the exact opposite. What we have here is a boundary case involving two incompatible physical theories, relativity (black holes) and quantum mechanics (hawking radiation), so paradoxes might be expected.
Mr. Watson;
It only shows that physicists were confused about black hole formation, but they knew they were confused (objections to Hawking's original theory showed up shortly after he published it). I actually wondered about the same thing that Hawking is claiming now, the premature evaporation of a black hole. I should have worked on that instead of wasting my time on weblogs :-).
I wonder what the Las Vegas point spread was on this bet. Can you imagine mob enforcers trying to collect on the suckers who sided with Hawking? You don't think he took a dive, do you?
Posted by: Robert Duquette at July 18, 2004 1:30 PMWhat's the vig on an encyclopaedia ?
Pocket dictionaries ?
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at July 19, 2004 3:56 AM