Black holes ain’t so black
Stephen Hawking is scheduled to deliver a paper at the upcoming GR17 conference explaining in detail why he has been wrong all these years. For 30 years, in fact Prof. Hawking has put forth the proposition that a black hole swallows up all ‘information’ about objects that fall into its event horizon with the caveat that particles could be emitted as radiation through a kind of “black hole evaporation” just outside the event horizon which would ultimately drain the energy of the black hole itself. The point being that since this Hawking Radiation doesn’t carry any useful information about the objects that have been swallowed up, there is a paradox with the laws of quantum mechanics which state that such information cannot really be lost.
Read on for 5 geeky things you can do to better prepare for the event.
Brush up on the calculations for Hawking Radiation. Re-read some of the great bits from A Brief History of Time. Watch Descent the Star Trek the Next Generation episode where Data plays cards with Prof. Hawking. Listen to Pink Floyd, the Division Bell tune Keep Talking for the eerie Hawking ramble. Seek out and read The Cartoon History of Time by Kate Charlesworth and John Gribbin (thats where I grabbed the scan at right)
Comment posted on 7-21-2004
It was those darn “quantum fluctuations”! Maybe if scientists watched more Star Trek, this would have been solved sooner.
story here
Comment posted on 7-22-2004
I recently listened to Brian Greene’s "Fabric of the Cosmos" on iPod. The next 20 years will most probably change the popular cosmological view dramatically.