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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.
Hawking to streak naked through the Cambridge campus while screaming "I know nothing about physics!" might be a bit more problematic.
..the odds get longer the nearer you get to it.
:)
"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.
The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will"."
So... Your encyclopedia has been thrown at the nearest blackhole... Since you proved me wrong, you'll be quite able to recover the information presented in it...
how long until
Indeed - there isn't a Cambridge campus.
So it is safe to store my data in a black hole?
Great!
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
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?
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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".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.
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.
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.