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Famous Hawking Black Hole Bet Resolved?

Posted by simoniker on from the brittanica-please dept.

Mick Ohrberg writes "In 1997 the three cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist -- that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it. It now looks like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias of his choice, since physicists at Ohio State University 'have derived an extensive set of equations that strongly suggest that the information continues to exist -- bound up in a giant tangle of strings that fills a black hole from its core to its surface.'"

3 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. So the question is... by NeoTheOne · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    is this like an infinite number of monkeys with those typewriters? And since time passes so strangly there, why the heck haven't we detected x-rays sending Shakespear?

  2. Re:stephen lost - on the rampage in Boulder? by cruff · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    When I looked at the picture, the building in the background reminded me immediately of those on the University of Colorado (Boulder) campus.

  3. Re:Does it matter? by dilweed · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Thanks for the crap moderation, cowards.

    I posed a very serious question for very serious discussion, and only Fantastic had the guts to reply in a serious manner.

    We've only recently have begun to discuss human travel to Mars, the next planet in our solar system. I question our ability to harness this discovery to better humankind in the next 5 centuries, much less tomorrow. Can you give me one deep space discovery that affects our daily life? The only one I can think of would be x-rays, over 100 years ago.