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Steven Hawking Loses Bet On Black Holes?
st1d writes "Looks like Steven Hawking might have to pay up on an old bet regarding black holes - seems his idea about them destroying information wasn't quite living up to his expectations: 'The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics.' He's due to make a formal announcement July 21."
If this is the same bet I remember... he wanted to be wrong. His expectation, and hope was that he would loose the bet... he took the bet because if his theories turn out to be wrong, at least he gets the prize of the bet as consolation.
---Lane
"Whereas Stephen Hawking has such a large investment in general relativity and black holes and desires an insurance policy, and wheras Kip Thorne likes to live dangerously without an insurance policy.
Therefore be it resolved that Stephen Hawking bets one years subscription to PENTHOUSE as against Kip Thorne's wager of a 4-year subscription to PRIVATE EYE, that Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole of mass above Chandrasekhar limit."
It was signed by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne.
for those not of these shores Penthouse is a top shelf soft porn mag and Private eye is a current affairs/political satyrical publication.
Yes, with Kip Thorne. You can find a reproduction of the actual bet document here:
Penthouse Bet
Word is that Kip's wife was seriously put out about the payoff. Some people just don't appreciate winning.
KFG
Having worked with disabled people in a support capacity earlier in life, I can offer some observations (which are fully qualified as personal opinion only!):
1. Disabilities affect your state of mind. Just as you think differently if you speak a different language or come from a different culture, the mere fact that you're disabled impacts ALL aspects of your life, directly or indirectly. Think of it this way: if you know, for example, that you will NEVER have a sex life and that you will NEVER go through the traditional dating/marriage male/female dynamic, how does that change you life? For better? For worse?
2. Disabilities usually come with ongoing pain. Sores from prolonged periods of sitting in a wheelchair. Muscle problems from over developed/under developed muscles due to 'incorrect' body posture. Rashes from your adult diapers. Pain is NOT a natural state, and will pervade all aspects of your personality. When my mother had a serious muscle injury that persisted for about 18 months, the constant pain changed her personality completely (for the worse). Many times this is the reason why elderly people seem cantankerous and cranky...this is not their natural disposition. They were not 'always this way'.
3. People with disabilities are needy. Some more than others. The best adjusted ones are people who have disabilities onset late in life, or the ones that somehow have the strength of will (plus physical capability) of being independent. But some do not/cannot become independent, and thus are need as a matter of living. In many disabled people, I've seen an amplified sense of demand and outrage at minor things. It also amplifies the 'me-me-me-me' attitude, which I interpret as a corrupted sense of self preservation.
I think the movie "My Left Foot" did a great job portraying all of the personality differences if you're looking for a good dramatised case study.
Short of it is: I don't doubt that Hawking is an a**hole. I would be a bit surprised if he wasn't, in all honesty. But try not to judge too harshly...despite his great intelligence I suspect his social skills are unique to himself and somewhat limited. In this case I prefer to feel pity for his first wife, and reserve judgment on the man.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
He made that bet as a joke. All of his work was on black holes so he made a bet with kip Thorne that they didn't. So if all of his work was about things that didn't exist, he would still have won the bet. He finnally conceeded in 1997, and paid off his bet with a couple of playboys.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=maths
It violates the third law of thermodynamics, that the universe moves towards an increasingly entropic state.
Look at it this way: if all the matter in the universe were condensed into a black hole which in doing so destroyed all the information about that matter, the universe would be less entropic than before the black hole consumed everything.
Hawking radiation was in fact initially proposed as a means of seeming to counteract that: the radiation emitted due to quantum pair formation at the event horizon was calculated so that the following was always true: the Hawking radiation contributed more entropy to the universe than the infalling matter could have contained. Considering that the event horizon increases with the mass of the black hole, the balance was maintained.
String theory, for several reasons, has changed some of the underlying theories, hence the upcoming speech.
"Stumble before you crawl"
That is exactly wrong. Black holes radiate (no pun intended) a black-body spectrum, which is a spectrum of maximal entropy. This had been proven several different ways by the mid-seventies. If black holes destroyed information, which radiation, containing no information, would be the end of the story. (Pun intended, this time.) However, ...
In QM, physical processes are represented by "unitary operators", which cannot destroy information. If you're familiar with Liousville's theorem in classical mechanics, it's a bit like that.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
Okay some facts about black holes: - The no hair theorem says that a black holes is described by 2 parameters, the mass M and the angular momentum J (classical spin if you must use that word). In case of a charged black hole you have to add the charge Q to get 3 parameters. From this one can argument that once information falls in a black hole it is lost since we only see 3 parameters. But others say that is just trapped inside the black hole. (the jury is still out) - The Beckenstein-Hawking formula (giving the bound) is related to the radiation of a black hole in the following way. A black hole radiates thermal radiation, with that one can associate a themprature, with that temprature an entropy wich after calculation turns out to be proportinal to the area. - Since this is proportinal to the area t'Hooft suggested tha holographic principle. - I don't think this is a real problem now, since no-one said that the infomation is really lost, so recuperating it might not be a problem. What could be is that the radiation turns out to be non thermal and then it could de harder (no idea how to do that) to calculate the entropy classically. But string theory for instance can calculate the entropy explicitly without the need for thermal radiation and an associated themprature. Hope that helps somewhat (hope I made only correct statements too)
#1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type.
On the contrary, it's a most valuable view, and very helpful for seeing why unitarity and/or determinism is fundamental to the Second Law, not in opposition to it.
It reminds us always to remember that the entropy is not a property of the universe itself, but rather it is a property of the description of the universe -- coarse-grained and inevitably simplified -- that we have chosen to adopt.
So, in the simplest terms, we think of the universe evolving from one of a set of initial microstates M1 through a complicated black-box operation to one of a set of subsequent microstates M2. Because of determinism, each initial state in M1 evolves to exactly one subsequent state in M2. But our description of the initial state -- in terms of macroscopic variables &c -- is not sufficient to identify the microstate. Our description is missing some of the information, and this is the entropy S1.
If we could perfectly map our whole initial distribution of possible states through the black box, microstate by microstate, then our final entropy would still be exactly S1, reflecting the deterministic evolution of that initial distribution of states. But inevitably we can't follow all of the shuffling in the black box in that detail, so some of our initial information ceases to be useful -- with the result that at the end of the process there is more information we are missing, so S2 >= S1.
So the Second Law inequality rests on two things: the total amount of information there is to know remains the same (because of the determinism); but the amount of useful information we actually have has fallen (because we couldn't follow the shuffling) -- and that is why the difference between the two, the entropy, the information we don't have, has increased (or at best remained the same). The second law does not conflict with the assumption of determinism: it depends on it.
This carries over directly to quantum mechanics, where the meaning of unitarity is essentially a guarantee that volumes in the phase space are preserved -- a grid of microstates maps forward to another grid of microstates the same size. Again, this does not conflict with the second law; it guarantees it.
In terms of the accounting, it's very important that the microstate of the Hawking radiation does represent information about the state of the universe, but information that we don't have.