It may not seem that interesting at first glance, but the fact that black holes are now thought by Hawking to release information rather than destroying every single bit of anything that drops into them, is rather esoteric indeed. What do you think such ancient information could consist of, and in what manner do the black holes release this info? I’d like to know more. Anyone out there have any new information on this relatively recent revelation of Hawking’s (2004)?

Hawking cracks black hole paradox (New Scientist)

After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

It was Hawking’s own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This “Hawking radiation” contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking’s argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.

Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory – in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles – then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this “fuzzball” does contain information about the insides of a black hole (New Scientist print edition, 13 March).

Now, it seems that Hawking too has an answer to the conundrum and the physics community is abuzz with the news. Hawking requested at the last minute that he be allowed to present his findings at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland.

“He sent a note saying ‘I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it’,” says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany…[Complete article]

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