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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.)
How does Hawking's "theory" on black holes even rise above a hypothesis? The top poster was right, was there any controlled test that was done to see if information really does make it out of a black hole?
What makes this any more than a hypothesis arrived at using math?
My feeling is that theoretical physics is pretty useless when it is being used to describe something that can not be realistically verified. I mean, with black holes, we think we've detected them but there's not even any real solid proof that they exist at all.