God, holes, strings, dice, cats, cricket, are you charmed, or is it all too strange?
Apparently Stephen Hawking now says black holes aren't quite so black, after all.. As I understand it (which is not very well) his old theory was that once anything (matter / energy) crossed the event horizon and entered the black hole, you could pretty much kiss it goodbye, the black hole would release what has since been called "Hawking radiation" but the information content would be irretrievably lost..
He now says "The black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell in, so we can be sure of the past and we can predict the future". There's more in the NYTimes
In an asuming aside, Stephen Hawking apparently made a bet in '97 with John Preskill, a Caltech physicist, that information about what went into the black hole could never be retrieved, Preskill insisted it could .. At stake apparently was an encyclpaedia from which information, needless to say, could be freely retrieved.. After his dramatic recantation, Hawking lived up to his word, and presented his American colleague with "Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia"
Just before he handed over the book Hawking said, "I had great difficulty in finding one over here, so I offered him an encyclopaedia of cricket as an alternative, but John wouldn't be persuaded of the superiority of cricket".!! Tut, tut, these Americans, I tell you, will they never learn??..
If you want to know more, what better source than direct from the horse's mouth..
He now says "The black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell in, so we can be sure of the past and we can predict the future". There's more in the NYTimes
In an asuming aside, Stephen Hawking apparently made a bet in '97 with John Preskill, a Caltech physicist, that information about what went into the black hole could never be retrieved, Preskill insisted it could .. At stake apparently was an encyclpaedia from which information, needless to say, could be freely retrieved.. After his dramatic recantation, Hawking lived up to his word, and presented his American colleague with "Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia"
Just before he handed over the book Hawking said, "I had great difficulty in finding one over here, so I offered him an encyclopaedia of cricket as an alternative, but John wouldn't be persuaded of the superiority of cricket".!! Tut, tut, these Americans, I tell you, will they never learn??..
If you want to know more, what better source than direct from the horse's mouth..