Hawking Explains Black Hole u-turn
Black Hole u-turn: Professor Stephen Hawking, a cosmologist, lost one of the most famous bets in the history of science this week when he said he didn’t believe the 1975 black hole theory that made him famous.
The best-selling author of A Brief History of Time agreed that U.S. theoretical physicist Professor John Preskill was right to doubt his theory and gave him a baseball book as a prize.
Hawking, who works at the University of Cambridge, said, “I am now ready to give up on the bet.” “I gave him a cricket encyclopedia, but John wouldn’t be convinced that it was better.”
Hawking took the bet in 1997 when Preskill from the California Institute of Technology refused to believe that black holes permanently destroy everything they consume.
Scientists have been trying to figure out black holes for more than 200 years. Black holes are made when stars use up all their fuel and fall apart, creating a huge gravitational pull.
Hawking said in 1975 that a black hole was so strong that anything that crossed its edge, called the event horizon, would be swallowed up forever.
But after almost 30 years, he admitted that his theory about black holes being bottomless pits in space that sucked up all matter and energy like a giant vacuum cleaner was wrong.
Hawking now thinks that over billions of years, some material leaks out through tiny cracks on the surface of black holes.
A crowded meeting
Last week, he gave a few brief details about his change of heart. This week, he went into more detail about it at an international conference on general relativity and gravitation in Dublin. He asked to speak at the last minute.
“I always hoped that when Stephen gave up, there would be a witness; this is really more than I could have hoped for,” Preskill said, pointing to the rows of TV cameras in the packed auditorium.
He said he would miss the years of debate over whether or not things could get out of the so-called “black hole information paradox.”
Others said they wouldn’t decide until Hawking’s new theory was out in the open.
Theoretical physicist Professor Kip Thorne, who works with Preskill, said, “On the surface, this seems like a great argument.” “But I don’t know everything yet.”
Hawking said that his new version of his theory got rid of his old idea that people could use black holes to travel to other universes in the future.
“I’m sorry to let down people who like science fiction,” he said. “But if you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will come back to our universe, but in a messed-up way.”
Leaky black holes
Hawking’s research, which he shared this week at a conference in Dublin, solves a mystery that has been hanging over one of the most important parts of his theory.
Hawking said that black holes give off energy, a process that became known as “Hawking radiation.” He also said that black holes lose mass over time, shrinking until they disappear in a huge explosion.
This idea says that a black hole only has mass, charge, and spin.
Inside the black hole, there was no information about the matter inside, and when the hole went away, all the information went with it.
Critics of this mathematical approach asked how it could work with one of the rules of quantum physics, which says that all information must stay in balance as the universe changes and can never be completely lost.
If that were true, they said, it would have huge effects on how we think about time. If information is lost, no one can know for sure what happened in the past or what will happen in the future.
Hawking has always said that black holes have gravitational forces that are so strong that they break quantum laws.
In his new version, he says that black holes do not destroy everything that passes through the event horizon. They keep sending out radiation for a long time and then eventually open up to let information out from inside.
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