Hawking backtracked on his position on black holes

Stephen Hawking says he was wrong about an important argument he made 30 years ago about the behavior of black holes

The famous physicist called an international press conference on Wednesday to change his mind, black people destroy everything that falls to them. He will inform the conference in Dublin that he believes black people may still be afraid of information leaking out.

His new findings may help solve the "black hole information paradox", which continues to trouble physicists in the field of modern physics. Professor Hawking has yet to reveal the details of the mathematics behind his new ideas, but some topics have been leaked from a seminar he gave at the University of Cambridge.

Gary Gibbons, also a physicist from Cambridge who was present at the seminar, said that the black holes described by Hawking did not have a defined event horizon, which hides everything inside them from the outside world. "It is possible that what he presented at the seminar is indeed a solution," Professor Gibbons told New Scientist magazine. "But I think the decision has not yet been made."

It is Professor Hawking's work that created the black hole information paradox. In 1976, Hawking calculated that the moment a black hole is formed, it begins to radiate energy and lose its mass. The radiation does not reveal information about the material inside the black hole, and as soon as the black hole disappears, all the information inside it disappears with it.

"It used to be thought that once something falls into a black hole, it is lost forever, and the only information left about it is its mass and its spin," said the professor, who holds the Lucas Chair of Mathematics in Cambridge. "But some time ago I discovered, black holes are not so black after all. They emit radiation, which has been nicknamed 'Hawking radiation'. Thanks to this radiation, black holes will lose mass and eventually evaporate completely." "Hawking radiation appeared random and featureless, so all information about what fell into the black hole seemed to be lost." However, this fact is in contradiction to the laws of quantum mechanics, which describe the behavior of the universe at the smallest sizes. Its laws do not allow information to be completely lost. "If information can be lost, it has important practical and philosophical implications," Hawking added.

"We couldn't be sure of the past or predict the future exactly. Many people, therefore, wanted to believe that information could escape from the black hole, but they didn't know how it could do so."

Over the years, the physicist claimed that the extreme gravitational fields of black holes somehow nullify the quantum laws. Now, he gives up on that idea. Professor Hawking's new black holes do not completely destroy anything that falls into them. Instead, they continue to emit radiation for extended periods, and eventually open and reveal the information, hidden within them.

"I've been thinking about this problem for 30 years, and now I have the answer," he explained.

"The black hole just seems to form, but later it opens up and releases information about what fell into it, so we can be sure of the past and predict the future."

The change of position may cost Professor Hawking in the encyclopedia. He and the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology intervened on the issue with John Parskill, also of Caltech.

Hawking and Thorn are to give Priscilla an encyclopedia of his choice.
Translation: Dikla Oren

 
Hawking probably lost the intervention - black holes also emit information
The famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, who wrote the book "A Brief History of Time", is going to announce this Wednesday at an international conference in Dublin, that he was wrong when he stated in the mid-70s that "information" cannot come out of a black hole. Preliminary details about his lecture were given in the framework of a seminar given by Hawking at the University of Cambridge where he works.

The first proposal regarding the existence of black holes was made already in 1783, by the English astronomer John Mitchell, however, no one thought there was any truth in his idea and it was abandoned. In fact, it was only in the 60s of the 20th century that the actual discussion of the possibility of the existence of black holes began. One of the people who contributed to the study of the idea and its promotion was Stephen Hawking, a world-renowned astrophysicist, who while still a student contracted a severe and incurable degenerative disease (sclerosis of the lateral column of the spinal column or ALS).

According to the accepted theory, when the nuclear fuel that supplies energy to the star runs out, gravity causes the material of the star to collapse inward. If the mass of the star is extremely large (3.5 times or more than the mass of our Sun), all the material of the star is compressed into a single point of tiny dimensions, and a very high mass known as a singularity - this is a black hole. Although not an actual hole, black holes got their name from the fact that nothing can escape or be ejected from them, not even light, due to their immense gravity. This is why some describe black holes as the "suckers of matter and radiation" of the universe.

In the mid-70s, Hawking published his theory, according to which some radiation still manages to escape from the black hole. The radiation, known as "Hawking radiation", is a type of energy leakage from the black hole and therefore, Hawking stated, that within tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of years, the black holes will evaporate. The problem with Hawking's theory is that the radiation emitted by the black hole does not contain "information" about the bodies swallowed inside it. This part of the theory conflicts with the quantum theory, which describes how space and matter behave on a tiny scale, which contradicts this claim. The theory states that any process can be reversed and thereby determine what happened at the beginning, even if it is a strange and powerful body like a black hole.

Hawking was not convinced that there was a problem with his theory, and even intervened with a theoretician in the field of physics named John Parskill, from the Tech Cal Institute in the USA, because in the end it would turn out that he was right. Now it seems that Hawking is about to admit his mistake. This Wednesday, as part of the conference 17 For the theory of relativity and gravity to be held in Dublin, Hawking will speak and will probably explain how the black hole nevertheless emits "information", by means of which it is possible to know what Swallowed inside the black hole One of the implications of the new theory may be that the black hole is not characterized by a point known as a "singularity".

Physicist Kurt Cutler, who is organizing the conference, said in an interview to the magazine "New Scientist" that he received a note from Hawking in which he wrote "I solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it." Cutler admitted that he decided to comply with the extraordinary request, without seeing a paper explaining what he was going to talk about. "To be honest, I relied on Hawking's reputation when I decided to approve his request," Cutler said.

It should be noted that the debate between the scientists is conducted on a theoretical level, while relying on complex mathematical formulas that only a few in the world are able to deal with. The attempts to turn the theoretical debate into a practical one, encountered difficulties due to the practical inability to simulate what happens inside a black hole or near it. Hawking's colleagues said that if it turns out that he reverts to his previous position, he will be forced to buy his colleague Priscilla an encyclopedia "from which information can be retrieved whenever you want."

Black holes
How is a black hole formed? A black hole is formed when extremely massive stars end their lives in a big explosion, known as a supernova, and collapse in on themselves.

What is the origin of the name? Even light moving at a speed of 300 km per second is unable to "escape" from the enormous gravitational field of the black hole that swallows it, hence its name - black hole. To "escape" from the Earth's gravity, for example, one must move at a speed of 11.2 km m per second

How many holes are there? So far, several dozen black holes have been discovered in the universe, one of which is in the center of the "Milky Way" galaxy where our solar system is also located

The debate: It is not known what happens to the material sucked into the black hole, and the debate on the subject is mainly theoretical. Hawking previously claimed that radiation known as "Hawking radiation" is emitted from the black hole, however, it does not provide "information" about the objects sucked into it. Now he may return.
Finally: Hawking admits that even black holes emit information

Hawking at a conference in Ireland, yesterday. Oscillations allow the radiation emitted from the black hole to produce "information" about the material swallowed inside it

British physicist Stephen Hawking explained yesterday how one of the well-known paradoxes in astrophysics can be solved: the disappearance of "information" inside a black hole. In doing so, Hawking retracted a theory he formulated in '74, which stated that information entering a black hole is lost forever.

In the past, Hawking established the claim that a black hole is not so black, since it also emits radiation, known as "Hawking radiation". This radiation will cause at the end of a long process, which may last tens of billions of years, the evaporation of the black hole and its disappearance. However, what happened to the "information" about all the objects swallowed by the black hole? Was the "information" about them also lost? Hawking believed until recently that the answer was positive, but this position stands in opposition to quantum theory, which states that information is not lost but is preserved in some way.

Yesterday, at an international conference in Dublin, Ireland, Hawking explained how the paradox can be resolved. According to him, quantum theory does not treat particles like electrons or atoms as being in one place. It refers to the probability that an electron or atom will be at one point or another, since they are constantly moving. The same logic can be applied to the "event threshold" - the area that defines the pumping range of a black hole. The threshold of the event also moves and sways in space. These fluctuations allow the radiation emitted from the black hole to produce a certain type of "information" about the material swallowed inside it. Thus, before the black hole evaporates, it "tells" what is coming to it.

According to Hawking, one of the implications of solving the paradox is that a black hole cannot be used as a means to move to another universe.