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."

Comments

Integrity

[Stephen R Hall]

It shows the character of the man - not only is he prepared to admit he was wrong, but will present detailed scientific proof of why he was wrong.

Re:Integrity

[EMH_Mark3]

Nice theory but you forgot that SPAM can't carry any useful information, much like wave interference patterns :)

Re:Integrity

[timalewis]

I think you could perhaps attribute his attitude more to the fact that he is a Cambridge academic and less to the fact that he is in a wheelchair.

Re:Integrity

[SunPin]

Amigo, I'm sorry to hear about the horrible experiences you've had with the disabled. Since you experienced them in a work capacity, I can only suspect that it was a hospital or social services setting. Unfortunately, *nobody* is mentally well adjusted in those environments. Perhaps you should try spending time around a university or socially progressive areas like South Florida, Southern California, Berkeley, Madison, etc.

Everybody knows some really bad apples. In college, I knew a guy that pretty much represented everything you wrote. He was a demented fuckup. I remember hearing other disabled kids grumbling stuff like, "as long as that asshat exists, he's going to make things harder on everybody [who is disabled]."

Hawking is remarkable because of the severity of his disease. I can't imagine living in pain or without my wood but I know what the wheelchair is like and I know guys with the pain/wood issues that are happily married with children and paying their taxes every year.

It's always annoying to see somebody use "always" or "never". At /., that's usually a tipoff to a troll. I understand what you wrote and how those ideas may have evolved. You have the right to keep them despite anything I or anybody else presents to the contrary. The only thing I ask is that you leave a wider door open for the possibility that you could be entirely wrong.

It's the scientific thing to do, as Hawking eloquently demonstrates. Furthermore, the disabled know what they are up against. There's no need to make things harder by putting observations from a limited pool of experience into the net. Peace.

Re:The man's got the Rep

[ponxx]

I think there are a few people of this stature in any field, just most of them are not as much in the public eye as Hawking.

I can think of any number of scientists in fields I'm vaguely familiar with that would be granted time to speak at a conference at short notice without much proof of what they are going to say.

However, *what* they say will still be up to intense scrutiny. There's nothing like proving an eminent scientist wrong or disproving an accepted theory to advance ones career in science...

Anyway, it's the same anywhere in society. If you have a good reputation, people will at least listen to you. They won't necessary agree, but they will be willing to listen...

Re:Dupe

[ctid]

This is not a dupe! The story from March was a group of scientists at Ohio State University which disputed Hawking's position. This story is about Hawking himself giving a paper at a conference in Ireland, where he will presumably give his latest views on the topic.

I'm a little surprised that the parent poster got moderated up for this. It's not "informative" (IMO of course) to just call something a dupe without checking.

Re:The man's got the Rep

[JohnFluxx]

What are you on about? His reputation, in this case, is allowing him to speak at conferences without prior peer review. Speak. That's it.
It's not like it's going to be accepted as the 'currently known correct view' without peer review. It's just a talk.

Who is this Steven Hawking fellow?

[Senjutsu]

And does he have any relation to Stephen Hawking?

Re:Winning a bet...

[Fizzog]

The thing about time travel is that if it is *ever* going to be possible then it has already happened in the future.

And if so then there would be time travellers all over the place right now.

Which of course always makes me think about Repo Man...

Re:Which laws?

[JPMH]

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.

Um, no.

Maximal entropy = maximum number of corresponding microstates. The universe is in just one of those microstates, not any of the others, so in selecting that microstate the Hawking radiation does actually represent an real flow of information.

If this is enough to guarantee that the Second Law of thermodynamics is obeyed, as the previous poster suggested, ie that

Entropy rate of the Hawking radiation + change in entropy of the black hole > all the entropy of particles falling into the black hole

then there's no really fundamental reason why the whole thing shouldn't be compatible with a more fine-detailed, deterministic quantum description for the whole process.

Can anyone here confirm that second-law inequality ?