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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."
...against Hawking would be something to tell the grandchildren about. Hell, it would be an honor to lose a bet to him.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
I recall a bet he made involving a subscription to Penthouse.
I doubt there are few if any other scientists who could so influence his peers.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
""Since Stephen has changed his view and now believes that black holes do not destroy information, I expect him [and Kip] to concede the bet," Preskill told New Scientist. The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will"."
I like the sense of humor of these guys. Its comforting to know that there is something shared between some of the spectalcular minds and the rest of us that we can relate to.
I wonder about the transform that must happen with the information when it gos into a black hole. For example radio waves. Or maybe light or matter. How is that all preserved if it is only turned into the one kind of radiation? is it just transformed and maybe its original form lost? or say something else? If a spaceship were to fall into a black hole would not the information of that matter ever being a spaceship and say maybe occupants be obliterated?
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From the article:
;-)
The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will".
The bet was about an encyclopaedia. The time when the bet was made that was still a lot of books. Later it became some discs. Now it is Wikipedia or even the Internet, if you like.
So is he going to give a way an AOL CD?
Seriously, I wonder what he(or you) now sees as an encyclopaedia or something "from which information can be recovered at will".
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It shows the character of the man
Actually, reading after his biography (sorry can't remember which one) I got the feeling he was not really a very nice person at all. He came across as extremely arrogant and intolerant. True, he's been through and overcome a lot, but the way he treated people around him was not very nice at all.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
For a scientist of his stature to admint he was wrong is a credit to the man and the profession.
Uhm, this isn't the first time he's been wrong. Indeed, the whole field of science is built upon scientists making educated and well-reasoned theories, then trying to prove it wrong. Pretty much all of our presently widely-accepted rules have come about this way. Many of them are even still called "theories." For example, "The Theory of Flight" has not been conclusively proven as a "Law" yet. Ditto for the Theory of Relativity, the Theory of Evolution, and the Theory of Atoms. We accept most of these ideas as facts nowadays, but the truth is, they're actually still just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
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A friend is at Cambridge, and he describes Hawking as a man who isn't afraid to use his wheelchair as a weapon (literally - not a fan of crowds, by all accounts), and knows his value to Cambridge as long as he remains there.
Having never met him I'd be loathe to criticise, but anecdotal evidence does suggest he's a grade A egotistical wanker. Or as Fox would put it, "Some people say he's a baby-eating wheeled menace who should be ejected into space; you decide".
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People who live in pain tend to be unpleasant characters. Sorry, it seems to work that way. That Hawking is able to be civil almost all the time is a great testiment to his social awareness. And his social awareness would make is "cripple" status particularly annoying to him.
I suspect that he pep-talks himself all the time, just to get through a day. I'm certain that he will be seen by many as arrogant and intolerant. But if he were to be tolerant *of himself* he might well collapse into self-pity. Similarly if he were to loose his good (arrogant) opinion of himself.
I am only sporadically troubled by a chronic pain. I'm told that the first thing that people notice that lets them know that I'm in pain is that I become more cutting, and my humor turns blacker. I don't notice this, myself, but it's been reported to me by someone I trust, AND used to diagnose when I was in pain, so I'm fairly certain that it's accurate.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It is like explaining that 2 X 2 = 4 and 3 X 3 = 9 and after spending another hour talking about powers and logarithms people would ask you: 'Yeah, and by the way what is 2 X 3, again?'
I am being serious. Anyone who tought in college would know how frustrating it might be sometimes.
Hawking is a better than average physicist, but he is far from the best... What he is very good at is explaining advanced concepts in a way that the educated (but not advanced degree in physics holding) crowd can understand.
He is also good at taking credit for work that is not his own. He has on 2 occasions had to apologize to professor Jimmy York for claiming Jimmies ideas as his own. Rumor has it that Jimmy says Hawking has done it again, but has not yet apologized this time.
He and his main collaborator (Roger Penrose) are widely regarded as ass holes (actually referred to as the twin ass holes) who capitalize greatly on other peoples work without doing much themselves in the cosmology community.
Posted AC to protect my fiancé (a cosmology PhD student), the source of most of my info on Hawking...
"I wonder about the transform that must happen with the information when it gos into a black hole. For example radio waves. Or maybe light or matter. How is that all preserved if it is only turned into the one kind of radiation?" With out going into too much detail, think of it this way: a hologram can be considered a 2-dimensional object that holds the information of 3-dimensions... A lot of physics at this level involves bending your mind around concepts that are nearly impossible to visualize; you simply have the math in front of you and then you try to interpret it.
Or is that slashdash. A five second Google search would have told the author of the article and the moderator that they had the wrong name, rotflmao! It's hard to look smart when you make really dumb mistakes like that!
Anybody know what implications, if any, this has for the entropy of black holes and the Beckenstein Bound?
I thought that the entropy of black holes was determined by the fact that the only information needed to describe it completely was its mass, charge, and spin. The entropy computed from this assumption is proportional to the area of the event horizon, and, hence, we get the Beckenstein Bound.
At least, that's what I thought. But if a black hole, in fact, contains information about everything that has fallen into it, wouldn't that affect its entropy, and hence imply that the Beckenstein Bound is wrong, and therefore overturn some very significant ideas resulting from the Beckenstein Bound, such as the Holographic Principle?
If that were the case, this would be a much bigger story than it appears to be, so what am I misunderstanding?
He left his wife for his nurse in 1990. According to his ex-wife, she started having an affair with a family friend in 1985, and at some point after that and before 1990, Mr. Hawking even sanctioned this affair.
n g/
More info here:
http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/08/12/hawki
I attended a lecture of Hawking's once at UCSB and let me tell you, he has an excellent sense of humor.
For a specific example he was talking about how he once gave a lecture in Paris about black holes, and after about 30 minutes realized that they didn't understand a thing he was talking about. It turned out that they thought he was talking about something obscene. He played off this for quite a while, ending with his dismissal of the black hole modled after string theory (fuzzball black holes) in which he claimed "A black hole has no hair... but this just confused the French even more"
it was quite something to watch one of the most brilliant minds in the world make jokes about the Simpsons and Star Trek while discussing Q-physics and whatnot.
Perhaps someone here can clear something up for me about the formation of black holes...
Let's say I'm watching something (a gigantic encyclopedia, say) collapse to form a black hole.
As the object collapses, its gravitational field gets stronger, and therefore, as observed from my vantage point, the time dilation effect gets stronger. i.e. From my perspective, the collapse proceeds ever more slowly. Although it never stops collapsing, I don't believe I would observe it actually turn into a black hole in a finite amount of time.
From the point of view of someone standing on the surface of the object, the reverse happens -- time in the universe outside seems to accelerate, to the point where the universe ends before the black hole is created.
So... my question is... are black holes actually formed in the universe, from our perspective? Or are there just a bunch of objects that look almost exactly, but not quite, like black holes (because they've been collapsing for billions of years)? Or were all the black holes created in the big bang? Or is there some neat trick that allows a nearly-black-hole to flip into a really-black-hole?
Sorry for the slight digression... it's just a question that's been bugging me for years.
Bruce
I read an article a while ago proposing that black holes with high rotational velocities lose more radiation near the equator. I wonder what would happen if two black holes collided at extreme velocity and broke apart enough to lose the "black hole" effect, becoming many small scattered chunks of high-density space debris. Is that possible? If so, wouldn't that count as returning information too? Hawking's new work seems to support that possiblility...
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In his biography of Feynman, "Genius", James Gleick basically comes out and states that there is a cult of personality around Hawking. I need to grab the book and find the exact passage, but he states that some physicists and cosmologists have gotten way too much pub due to their personal afflictions. And that many others who are perfectly healthy have had their work overlooked because they aren't in a wheelchair.
I don't know if it's quite that vitriolic, but I remember reading it and thinking "wow, he's no fan of Hawking."
Gleick's new biography is on Issac Newton, so perhaps he will have something else to say about modern physicists in there, I haven't read it yet.