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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".
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.
I recall a bet he made involving a subscription to Penthouse.
Hawking to streak naked through the Cambridge campus while screaming "I know nothing about physics!" might be a bit more problematic.
we are still guessing, we still have no real idea how the universe works
and anything is possible, just because we dont know how to do it doesnt mean its impossible, but we wont learn much from peering through the glass of this fishbowl we are living in and proclaiming we know how it all works
here's to improving guesswork for the next million years
"Hawking's black holes, unlike classic black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything within them from the outside world".
I wish he'd called them 'Fry Holes'.
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?
The largest adult anime collection on the net
For a scientist of his stature to admint he was wrong is a credit to the man and the profession. Especially since he went and did the additional leg work (no pun) to validate the theory himself.
..the odds get longer the nearer you get to it.
:)
WTF is "Steven" Hawking? His name is Stephen
He rolled away with the nurse that took care of him, or so I heard. On another note, check out www.mchawking.com - apparently he's had a second career as a gangsta rapper. A good 'nine will leave a few black holes in anyone, eh?
We are a long way from "proving" anything about black holes. All we are doing is producing theories that don't conflict too badly with the observed evidence. We're in the same position as 'scientists' in the middle ages describing planetary motion. They had a theory that accurately predicted the motion of the planets but that didn't mean that they understood the underlying process (ie. that the sun was the center of the solar system).
"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.
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.
now I look at it in more detail, never mind though. Here is a link to the original bet.
A number of years ago I saw a show where Hawking had mad a different bet with Kip Thorne concering the nature of black holes.
IIRC, the loser had to buy the winner a copy of Penthouse.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Indeed - there isn't a Cambridge campus.
The usual. One Dollar.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
Steven Hawking fallible.
Bush wrong on the weapons of mass destruction.
I don't know who to believe in anymore.
So it is safe to store my data in a black hole?
Great!
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.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Steve Hawkins is an interesting and cool guy (Actually so is Kip Thorne)
I wish I could tell my grandkids I won a bet against Steven Hawkins (or for that matter lost it)
I wonder if the encyclopedias will be on CD?
I like the sense of humor of these guys.
What a reputation! To be granted time to speak, without prior notice as to topic and specific content.
Wasn't he on Conan?
42
It's scary so many people think like me!
No I will not comment on donkeys or toner cartridges!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Not too big, but cold enough in winter to give extra meaning to the phrase "vanishing black hole".
Did John Titor submit these? ;)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The article from back in March talked about Samir Mathur's approach to the "Information Problem" with black holes. He uses string theory to show that the information may always be available and may, in fact, affect the "Hawking radiation" (the radiation that comes from black holes which allows them to evaporate - guess who discovered it?).
Hawking seems to be taking a different approach that is not dependant upon any particular theory like strings. The approach is especially interesting because it involves uncertainty in the position of the event horizon. Back in the early 70s, physicists noted a parallel between black holes and thermodynamics. One could assign a black hole "entropy" based on it's diameter. But since nothing could escape from a black hole, the black hole would have a "temperature" of absolute zero. This would result in a violation of thermodynamics. Most physicists were willing to accept this, but thanks to clues provided by the ability to extract energy from a rotating black hole, Hawking figured out that black holes did evaporate, which gave them a very low but non-zero "temperature." His basic analysis involved pair production near the event horizon - one particle would escape, one wouldn't, and the "invented" mass would need to be given up by the black hole. An alternative way of looking at the problem involved how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make the exact location of the event horizon vary slightly.
Information theory has significant parallels with thermodynamics. One might argue that they are actually the same thing expressed differenntly, except that black holes have an "information temperature" of zero. This violates the equivalent law in information theory that black holes were thought to violate in thermodynamics.
Having learned from history, many folks thought that some way would be found to extract information from a black hole. Hawking made the bet against what he hoped was true. His thought was that, if he was wrong, at least he'd win something!
It's interesting that the solution to the information problem may actually involve the alternative path that solved the thermodynamic problems with black holes, and that the alternative way of looking at things (the string theory approach) involves the behavior of particles.
When physicists speak of "beauty" they are usually referring to some behavior that is symmetric. The solution to the information problem might be thought of as beautiful because of the symmetry with the solution to the thermodynamic problem.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
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.
And does he have any relation to Stephen Hawking?
wow...a negative is greater than 42? Its more complex than I thought!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
He would certainly be under intense scrutiny. In fact, when reading his book (The Universe in a Nutshell) I spotted a mistake that I've never seen mentioned. Unfortunately it was just a missing space between two words. I was still quite proud though...
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...
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=maths
"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.
The original bet was for a subscription to Playboy. It was to Penthouse and Kip Thorne's wife was none to happy about it.
Reserved Word.
umm. Your post would have made a greater impact had you chosen a different method of setting the word 'taught' apart. You see, the connotation when one puts quotation marks around a word spelled incorrectly in a previous post is that one is making fun of the previous poster by quoting the misspelled word. You have placed the corrected word in quotes, which is confusing since the word 'taught' does not appear in the post you are replying to. You should either have used "tought" or taught to make a better impact. The way you did it makes you appear to believe 'taught' to be incorrect. Your message is spot on but your delivery was a bit off. I'm not intending any offense by this, but you may, of course, feel free to take some.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Will he be releasing a new rap song relating to this new revalation? :)
Place sig here.
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!
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997
hawking:~> wget -r http://wikipedia.org | tar czf - | mail preskill@caltech.edu
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
I call it a hawking hole.
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?
Are you kidding? Do you know how much tail he has gotten? Talk about overcoming adversity. I'd hang out with Stephen Hawking. He is dope.
Nichelle Nichols: "It's about that rip in space-time that you saw!"
Stephen Hawking: "I call it a Hawking Hole."
Fry: "No fair! I saw it first!"
Stephen Hawking: "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
(And then here's the MP3 of this great quote.)
Education is the silver bullet.
Imagine a very long, stiff rod. Now when you push, pull or twist one end, the other end must also move. But it can never take less time to transmit this movement than the time it would take a photon to reach the other end, otherwise information would be travelling faster than light, which is Not Allowed. (*)
..... and botany .....
Think of it as being like a load of tennis balls in a drainpipe: you stick one in your end, the next one squashes a bit, then moves a bit and recovers its shape, squashing the next one a bit, and so on. The molecules are not bonded to each other with absolute rigidity. And there is a quantum limit to how stiff matter could ever be.
Which fits right in with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, somehow or other. At least, it did when I was conducting experiments outside of the realms of physics and more into the domains of chemistry
* OK, two particles which always have opposite spin, blah blah blah, one in your lab, one in a spaceship several gigametres away, you expend an obscene amount of energy reversing the spin on yours, and the spin on the far one reverses at the exact same time. But so what? You can't use the phenomenon to impart any useful information to the other party. You already knew that the spins would always be opposite.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
He must have gained faith very recently because he said about a decade ago that he doesn't believe a god exists.Either that or you don't want truth to ruin a good joke.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
When I was in college, some friends and I (all physics majors) were having a bull session about whether or when someone would cough up a Grand Unified Theory. It was eventually agreed that it would depend largely on when the good Dr. Hawking died.
At the time, I don't think any of us thought he would still be around at this late date. Anyway, glad to see he's still kicking (so to speak) and doing new work.
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
I believe Einstein said to Hawking, "The Uncertainty Principle won't help you now. All the quantum fluctuations in the universe won't change the cards in your hand."
And Hawking showed his hand, which was 4 aces, and said, "Wrong again, Albert."
What ever happened to science? We truly live in an age where science fiction has become accepted as reality. Beam me up, Scotty!!
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!"
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.
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.
"the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings"
. . .
like the tangle of strings that prevents my paychecks from escaping the black hole of the Treasury department . .
or the tangle of strings that prevents my civil liberties from escaping the black hole of John Ashcroft . .
or the tangle of strings that prevents my time from escaping the black hole of slashdot . .
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
http://slashdot.org/~jesus
http://slashdot.org/~stephenhawking
what do ya'll think now?
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
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 ?
For a given amount of energy radiated, a black body spectrum represents the great possible entropy. I'm not sure whether you have confused yourself, or one of us has confused the other and we actually are in agreement. (I'm reasonably certain I have not confused myself!)
Except for that unitarity problem (and the superfluous word "rate" and the fact that it's greater than or equal, because the incoming energy may also be black-body), this is correct. And assigning to the black hole an entropy equal to 1/4 its surface area (times enough c's, G's, k's and h-bar's to make the units work out) makes the formula correct.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
No, he really meant "therapist".
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
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...
include $sig;
1;
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.
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.