Hawking Gracefully, Formally Loses Black Hole Bet

Liora writes "Today at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Cambridge University professor Stephen Hawking said in his talk titled The Information Paradox for Black Holes that he was wrong about the formation of an event horizon in a black hole, and that matter is not destroyed in a way defying subatomic theory, as he had previously believed. According to the talk's short, "the way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon." A New York Times story and a Wired story are available, both apparently based on Reuters information." (This is the formal announcement promised last week.)

Comments

BBC Article

[Tremyl]

For those avoiding registration, the BBC also has an story. My favorite part was the response of John Preskill, the other side of the bet. From the BBC article,

Later, Preskill said he was very pleased to have won the bet but added, "I'll be honest, I didn't understand the talk." He said he was looking forward to reading the detailed paper that Hawking is expected to publish next month.

Physics is a wonderful place, where not even the physicists know what the hell is going on!

Re:BBC Article

[ebassi]

Seventy years ago, Einstein estimated that there were only two people in the world who understood general relativity, and he was one of them.

Einstein said that, at that time, only three people in the world understood General Relativity. When a reporter asked Arthur Eddington (the second best person that, in fact, did know general relativity) for confirmation, he replied that he could not recall the third one.

Re:BBC Article

[wass]

I'm a grad student in physics. When my neighbor found this out a few months ago, he told me that he tried studying physics back in the day but gave it up because it was too hard. He was convinced that physicists purposely make learning physics difficult in order to keep most of the public away, and make it an elite society.

I replied that physics IS really hard, and relies on a strong mathematical basis, and thus entails lots and LOTS of math. His counterreply was that this was questionable, and that one COULD be a physicist without going through the math. And he proceeded to tell me how he read Copernicus and Galileo's writings in one of his supposed 'physics' classes.

I tried to explain that without math, physics would be philosophical conjecture. Actually, physics WAS philosophy back in the day, it was called "natural philosophy". However, they diverged, the mathetically and experimentally based one becoming physics (and chemistry and biology, etc). Funny quote - one of my professors remarked that "Physics is Philosophy with Integrals."

Anyway, it was a weird situation. Although he did finally come around and told me that he realized without math, physics would be just bullshit. But he was convinced there was a much easier way to teach advanced physics than with lots of equations.

Re:Fails to give wheelchair ride?

[BlueCup]

I can understand how someone could find this offensive, but, I think it's just a little too harsh.

I personally have a handicap, and to be honest, I appreciate when people make jokes about it... I don't consider them cruel or offcolor, (except in the rare cases they are delivered with the intent of being cruel) to me its an acknowledgement of me as a person that someone can still treat as an equal. I doubt that there are many people who don't hold Hawking in extremely high esteem, and I in no way believe comments made by people who respect him in refference to his handicap would offend him, rather the people who try to ignore the obvious.

Re:Good for Hawking

[bs_02_06_02]

I think most university researchers or professors have a tremendous ego problem. I don't see Hawking having that problem which makes him far more likeable. He's almost humble, and has a great sense of humor.

I've never been very tolerant of arrogant professors. They often believe they can't be wrong, and that it's absurd to suggest that there's an alternative to their way of thinking.
I've also seen professors claim others' ideas as their own.

Re:Baloney!

[bobhagopian]

This misunderstanding stems from our science education in grade school, during which we're taught that a "theory" is just a guess that has yet to be proven.

Let me tell you about how theoretical physics really works. Quantum THEORY is just that, a theory. But it has been tested to unbelievable precision. Using the theory of quantum electrodynamics, one can calculate constants of nature from first principles to better than 12 decimal places. These theories are "right," even though there might be some improvement or refinement that comes along later.

That's the end of my general rant. Now to address specific things you said that were, quite ironically, complete baloney. You say general relativity (GR) hasn't been tested. Einstein's first prediction using GR concerned the deflection of light around the sun during an eclipse. His prediction was different from what others were saying, and when the eclipse of 1919 finally came, Einstein was vindicated. GR passes major experimental test #1.

Do you have GPS in your car? If you do, you may be surprised to know that those things rely on the mathematics of GR. Without taking into account some of the terms that pop out of the equations of GR, your GPS would never be able to locate you. But it can, and hence GR passes experimental test #2 with flying colors.

Finally, I point you to the Nobel Prize's page on Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor. They found experimental proof that two stars orbiting each other were decaying at a rate exactly in accordance to what had been predicted years before. This is a very stringent test of the validity of GR -- the stars were orbiting each other near the "strong field" where gravitational effects are really strong, and hence where any deviation from the behavior predicted by the theory should be obvious -- and, once again, GR passed the test like an Asian kid taking math.

A certain amount of skepticism is always healthy, of course. Do I think there will be eventual refinements to GR? Of course, probably in the form of superstring theory. But before you go around proclaiming that it's all baloney, you better figure out what you're talking about.

Not entirely unanticipated?

[HorsePunchKid]

The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

(Quote from the summary in one of the links from the submitter.) That pretty much sums it up to me (IANAP). We studied this in a class I took at UIUC called "The philosophy of space, time, and matter". (No, it wasn't a fluff course.) Basically, from the perspective of someone outside the black hole, the event horizon never actually forms. You see matter spiral in toward the black hole, radiating energy as it falls in (we observe this as x-ray bursts). But you never see the matter actually hit the event horizon! If the universe would last long enough (it won't), you would see that by the time the matter hit the event horizon, the black hole would have evaporated (due to Hawking radiation).

What Hawking seems to be saying to me is that since the matter never enters the hole from the perspective of an observer outside the hole, the information is never lost. Does this make sense?

Re:Like Einstein?

[wass]

Not just Einstein, but there are still several experiments trying to prove (or really disprove) well-known 'laws'.

For example, a number of very accurate clever experiments have been going on in the past decade or two to prove if the electric field in Coulomb's Law really goes as 1/r^2. These experiments have shown that it goes as 1/r^n where the error bars are tiny, but still enclose '2'. [Sorry, too lazy to look up the actual uncertainty numbers.]

Some people might think this is a waste of time, but if it was shown n=1.99999997 that would be a HUGE deal, and would require a re-write not only of Maxwell's laws, but of quantum field theory, and the standard model too.