The Washington Post noted that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft, who attended Hawking’s announcement, has been thinking about black holes and information loss in a similar way. “If he announces this as a new idea, I won’t be thrilled”.
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On Tuesday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking presented new theories on black holes to a crowd of esteemed scientists and members of the media at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. “There’s a way out”, he said. Any information particle sucked in by the hole would also disappear for good. Science says it can’t be permanently destroyed, but where does it go?
“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon”, he said on Tuesday.
From his wheelchair and through his dictation device, Hawking outlined his theory for how information can exit a black hole. Rather, it’s encoded into a 2D hologram called a super translation on the event horizon, which is emitted as quantum fluctuations.
Stuff that falls into a black hole is gone forever, right? Remember that concept named after Hawking we mentioned? The event horizon is a sphere around a black hole, beyond which the gravitational force becomes so high it is impossible to escape. “The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form”, Hawking said. The black hole formed when a large star caved in, and it pulls matter from a blue star beside it.
He was at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, which is hosting the Hawking Radiation Conference dedicated to examining the mystery of the “information paradox” – a conundrum concerning what happens to things swallowed by black holes. “They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought”, Hawking told a meeting of experts, according to the New Scientist.
More details are expected later today when one of Hawking’s collaborators Malcom Perry expands on the idea, and Hawking and his colleagues say they will publish a paper on the work next month, but it’s clear he is gunning for the idea that black holes are inescapable.
At Monday’s public lecture, he explained this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopaedia: You wouldn’t technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you’d have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota. Hawking even suggested that the information could come out in another universe.
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“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted”, he added.
