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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.)
I once asked the Slashdot editors why they didn't replace reg-required NYT links with reg-free links. They pointed out that there is a chance that the NYT could get its panties in a wad, and do something stupid. Lawsuits, goatse redirects, the works. Lawsuits... that would just be wrong!
Anyway, here's the obligatory reg-free link:
Are you looking at ME?
(Courtesy of these fine folks)
I've been hearing about this for like 4 days now... Is Slashdot turning into a News Black Hole?
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
It's great to see such an eminent scientist willingly admit that he was wrong, or at least only partially right. It seems that all too often the path that people and organizations choose is to deny, spin, and turn things on their heads to avoid embarassment. Hawking showed he is a good sport, proving not only does he have a brilliant mind, he is a classy person as well.
Wired says: The best-selling author of "A Brief History of Time"
;-)
I didn't know hawking sold so well
Anyway, to be on topic - can someone give more technical information on this? Many of us probably have a fairly high understanding of maths and physics, and want more details...
I really don't understand why the bet sneaks into every headline about this story. Why are humans so obsessed with who was right and wrong? That we have the information is all that really matters...
...that was the best thing I had going for me. It's what got me through the day. What do I have to look forward to now? Nothing, that's what!
"The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon."
That man is way too smart to be a human.
-matt
Userfriendly.org had a funny take on the payment of this bet.
Well... Obviously he's going to loose gracefully. Its not like he can get up and start yelling at the other guy. His chair probably doesn't even have an "Angry" voice
... because there's just no way the whole disagreement--and its resolution--could possibly based on the mathematics of black holes, or anything, right?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Wasted? Nonsense.
The objections Einstein posed to quantum theory were not spurious fluff, but hard-nosed challenges that any successful theory would have to meet. He made Bohr sweat more than once.
Would you prefer we just let something as absurd as quantum mechanics just slide? Scientists might as well all join the monestaries again.
Your statement "pretty much known to be true" is timid and sugary. Bring on the Einsteins.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Fry: Hey! Stephen Hawking! Aren't you that physicist who invented gravity?
Hawking: Sure. Why not?
Fry: Let me ask you something. Has anyone ever discovered a hole in nothing with monsters in it? [Hawking's eyes widen in horror.] 'Cause if I'm the first, I want them to call it a "Fry Hole."
Later:
Fry: So what do you nerds want?
Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw.
Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Hole."
Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
Hawking: Who is The Journal Of Quantum Physics going to believe?
Interesting note: Apparently Stephen Hawking did provide his voice for that episode.
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.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
So now all those aliens that got sucked into black holes in the seventies will be back in future Startrek etc episodes.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Oh damn, that means there's gonna be a sequel to Event Horizon... :o(
For those grammatically declined I'll explain it to you with an analogy. It's like when you were in high school and used mirrors to peek around the corner into the girl's locker room. The naked chick in the mirror is the APPARANT horizon. The naked chick that kicks the testes back inside your body shortly after DOES NOT EXIST.
Also, just for laughs (ok...hopefully for mod points too, I admit) Hawking is also a freaking awesome DJ and serial killer on the side. All my Shootin's be driveby's
Wu's site has other cool stuff to see too. (not a plug, just want to give credit to where the song is downloaded from)
Several years ago (well, it's probably more like 10 now...ugh) I saw Hawkings give a lecture aimed at the layman to a packed theatre. It was really very impressive -- despite the nature of what he was talking about and his physical limitations, he was engaging, humourous, and very understandable. He's a credit to his field and science in general -- not only through his intellectual achievements, but also through the class and humanity with which he conducts himself.
since my job has disappeared inside a black hole
and I still don't see any trace of it.
Your ego is Matrix!
No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney!
Amen Brother! It's all a con game. Hawking and the rest of his Star Strek and time travel fanatics have been bulshitting the world with their time warps and wormholes for a long time. I wonder when someone is going to expose those con artists for good.
I'm with me fellow deviantart(ist) here. having a handicap myself, unless the intent behind a joke is to be cruel and mean, instead of making people smile and laugh, it's a bad thing, otherwise I encourage people to make jokes about -my- disability, because in a sense it puts THEM at ease with it.
Machine9dotNet
From the Rueters article pubished by wired...
For over 200 years, scientists have puzzled over black holes, which form when stars burn all their fuel and collapse, creating a huge gravitational pull.
Now I'm no scientist, but 200 years of black holes seems like they're giving the issue more duration than history warrants. I thought the concept of a 'black hole' was a consequence of Einstein's relativity work (general, special I can never remember which is which... think it's general).
Am I wrong and just missed a whole bunch of science history?
Cheers!
SCB
Technically, the article said Hawking said that black holes do not lead to another universe. So if you want to think that there are other universes, you just have to look elsewhere.. String theory posits high dimensionality and "universes next door"; I'll remain parallel universe agnostic for the moment, but Hawking's point seems to have been that black holes do not eat information, and so they return the matter to the universe, and so he says, black holes are not an exit. If Hawking said definitively that our universe was the only existence, I would listen but I think unless we actually poke a hole into another universe with funky clues like, only 2 spatial dimensions (we could just be making a tesseract) or something, parallel universes will remain mostly philosophical.
Summary: Parallel universes aren't ruled out (at least by this article) so keep dreaming big! We'll need those other universes when entropy runs out in this one. Even better, ask someone who knows string theory whether the idea of multiple universes would be ruled out IF Hawking is right. Remember, he just lost a bet. He may be sure this time, but who's to say some bright kid 200 years from now won't have a different perspective... blah blah hypothetical
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
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.
Pleased to serve. What's your disability? I have jokes about all of them.
Why is anything anything?
We've known for a long time that whether you observe something to fall into a black hole or not depends on your reference frame. That is, if you are riding along with the object falling in, you will pass the event horizon with it and be crushed at the singularity in a finite amount of your time (proper time). However, if you observe something falling into the black hole from a safe distance beyond the event horizon, you will never see it fall in - although you also won't see anything after a short while, since the light from the infalling object becomes redshifted exponentially in time... (indeed black holes used to be called frozen stars for this reason). I am assuming that Hawking has shown working in a reference frame outside the black hole, that the faint radiation (the average wavelength is about the size of the black hole itself, and a solar mass black hole has a radius of about a kilometer) emerging from the black hole is affected by the wavefunction of the particles that have fallen in. I've also heard some people have doubts about using Euclidean path integral method (need to have time t go to i*t so that -t^2 -> t^2, i.e. time becomes another space like coordinate), and I'm looking forward to reading the paper. There are other papers out on this stuff - here's one by Stephens, 't Hooft and Whiting.
All Abstract Structures of Objects and their Relationships exist.
Some people who deal with him say he is difficult and arrogant.
He has been debating the issue for 30 years, and only now has he changed his mind. It took a lot of other evidence for him to change his theory, and it was a hot debate all the way. Hey, he made a bet of honor and stood by his opinion until others proved (to his own satisfaction) he was wrong.
That is what dealing with people in his realm of intelligence can be like. It may not always be pleasant and it may take a long time to get them to admit they are wrong.
But he is probably a nicer person than Newton.
...so I imagine that once the event horizon in my clothes dryer collapses I will get back all of my missing socks? ;)
You can still believe in paralell worlds via the "Many Worlds" interpetation of Quantum Physics. This just says that Black Holes probably don't lead to them.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
The man is reputed to have sold more books about physics than Maddona has about sex.
A fairly impressive achivement really.
Trailer is right here Site: www.mchawking.com
Sig: I stole this sig.
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?
Steven N. Severinghaus
This stuff is just awesome to think about. Here's some rambling. If anything makes sense I'd appreciate some feedback.
I hold that quantum theory is entirely a guess based on possibilities because we currently cannot (and perhaps never can) get true facts on the matter so that real analysis cannot be done. I don't know if anyone has any objections to this but I'm not sure if people realize it.
Take any level of physics, and only allow yourself to view it from a level above. You can come up with some good guesses as to how things will work which might have a very high degree of accuracy even 100%, but you are really just guessing. A simple example is that modern theory states that any two solid objects can pass through each other without interfering with each other at all-- it's just extremely improbable.
As a parallel: If you look at any scene in a 2 dimensional perspective you'll see objects passing through each other all the time (behind and in front although to 2d it's the same space). Now if the universe was 2d we could say that everything exists on the same 2d plane and any objects passing through each other is known to be impossible, but we know there's a 3rd dimension so to us it's entirely possible, even though everything in that universe is on the same plane. Well everything in this universe is in the same space, that is, they are all on the same 4th, 5th, 6th etc dimensional coordinates-- but that can just as easily change.
A 1 dimensional basic has 2 points connected by one line.
A 2 dimensional basic has 3 points, connected by three lines, encompassing one face.
A 3 dimensional basic has 4 points, connected by six lines, encompassing four faces, containing one space.
Guesses? A 4 dimensional basic has (5?) points, connected by (10?) lines, encompassing (5?) faces, containing (3?) spaces, bounding 1 thingy?
I know I'm not the only person who has tried to mentally vision higher order shapes!
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.
make world, not war
Well, the uncertainty of particle behavior at the quantum level would provide the perfect "loophole" for God to intervene without violating our laws of physics, no?
And as far as the classic attack on the "certainty" of the theory of evolution: science tries to compress the Universe into something we can understand, and evolution (with its problems) is the best it has gotten. Science, by definition, is classifying the physical world by human means, and trying to get something out of it. Religion is classifying the physical world by the use of God. Wouldn't the two give completely different results?
Signed, a Christian with an avid interest in science who has never found a problem between his two beliefs.
Hope you enJoy our Hawking comic... A Brief History of the Internet. :)
:-)
and be sure and do the JoyPoll, we've added a bonus Al Gore cameo.
Hawking is great and I am sort of disappointed that he found himself wrong. Why? Well, because I wanted space travel to be believable. He just ruined it for me. Okay, Cricket verses Baseball? I say U.S. college Football. :) Forget the other sports. They are off topic. ;)
Well, yes, but it's a solution to a philosophical problem that doesn't necessarily exist. Scientific laws are absolutely nothing more than expressions of an observed pattern. There is no empirical basis to claim that the pattern observed must always hold in all situations. Some believe that it does and that the laws of science can, in principle, be refined to the point where they are perfect predictors in all cases (possibly factoring in uncertainty), but that is more of a philosophical axiom than a scientific conclusion.
Anyway, the point here is that, philosophically, God is not bound by the laws of science. If God created and controls the universe, it is philosophically valid to view the laws of science as regularities we have observed in the way God choose for things to unwind. At one job, I used to quite consistently wear a T-shirt to work always and only on Fridays, and a co-worker joked that he didn't need a calendar to tell whether the weekend was coming up; he could just look at what I was wearing. This was a perfectly regular behavior according to his observations; he could have made a mathematical formula to predict it. However, if he had, this would not have in any way forced me to wear a T-shirt on Fridays or to wear something different on other days. Going back to God, when God behaves in a way that doesn't fit the expectations and that makes an exception to natural law, this is known as a "miracle".
On the other hand, uncertainty gives a whole extra level of leeway. Suddenly, there are an infinite number of possible "correct" ways (according to the laws of physics) for events to unfold, so as long as God chooses one of them, his actions don't disturb the natural order that has been established. (Why God would want to do this is another question, but one possible answer is to avoid making things so irregular that we cannot plan our lives and have some measure of control over what goes on around us. If we couldn't do that, it would be pretty chaotic and hard for finite creatures like humans to cope with.)
Also on this subject, there is the fascinating (to me) question of whether it's possible to create perfect physical laws and have all the necessary data to predict future events and have this all happen within the universe. This gets into all kinds of fun things like information content, density, etc., and it touches on the field of data compression. One thing we learn from data compression is that there is no such thing as a lossless compression algorithm that *always* compresses its input. (If there were, the consequences would include the ability to infinitely compress all files, and the ability to solve the unsolveable Halting Problem.)
But, it is still possible to create a lossless algorithm that losslessly compresses some inputs and losslessly expands others. So, to extrapolate (somewhat wildly) to the physical universe, it would seem the case that the universe cannot predict itself in all possible universes, but it may be possible that some universes could exists where it'd be possible to perfectly model the universe (and thus predict the future, etc.) from within the universe. If we should somehow discover that we live within one of those universes, then would really could fit the entire universe into our brains! Or at least some larger system that involves brains, computers, etc. It would be incredibly surprising to find out that we do live in such a universe though. (Which would be nice if it happened, since thenceforth nothing else would ever have to be surprising.) Anyway, the point is my gut tells me we cannot perfectly model the universe from within the universe, although it is not proven.
FWIW I'm a graduate in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and also studied Philosophy of Science (to a basic level) at Uni ... but call me a troll if you like. Hey call me anything it's late and I can't hear you!!
... oops, moving on]. Why not? It's a reasonable theory, is it falsifiable, I guess it is. But, you say, the Earth moves round the Sun and so the Earth can't be the centre of anything ... here's where Occam comes in and falls on his face. Yeah, the maths is hard if you consider the Earth to be static, but just because the maths is more beautiful in one formation does that make it more true??
:0)>
A theory is just a 'guess'. A very educated guess that has yet to be proved wrong. For it to be scientific I believe it must be provably falsifiable.
This kind of stems from my general belief that current theories work well and are mutually consistent (in the standard models and moreso) but are not necessarily "the truth".
[climbs on hobby-horse]
Consider the oft-repeated tale of people in the middle-ages believing that Jerusalem is the centre of the Universe. [Apart from that being a bit of a historical urban myth based on our assumptions having seen maps with Jerusalem at the centre! - prove me wrong reference a work that states "we believe jerusalem to be the physical centre of the universe"
[/off hobby horse]
Anyway Bob, the theories have been tested. Great. They are sound. But are they true? Are photon energies genuinely quantised, perhaps as science develops this "theory" will be a historical side-note like the greeks atom (meaning indivisable)? How can we say that quarks are primal matter at one stage and be "right" yet at a later date we decide that we have superstrings, then later m-branes. Are all these theories "right" by you? [Sorry can't think of alternates for GR, my mind is not that inventive].
PS: Your theory on Asian children is false. My friend Aleem can't do maths very well
(i'm agnostic or something, definitely not xtian though)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
So there was this priest, this rabbi and this guy who's right hand got tangled in the umbilical cord and as a result is severely mangled and doesn't really resemble a hand at all... Kinda hard to work with.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
... by someone who doesn't know physics.
t ml)
The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.
The Euclidean path integral is the latest trick in quantum gravity.
The original problem with quantum gravity was that as you "quantitized" space into discrete units, explaining gravity in terms of particles like 'gravitons' and trying to do the math was possible for simplistic interactions like tree diagrams where time generally flowed one way - but extremely hairy and full of infinities if you started looking at loop diagrams where time can flow both ways.
So people like Roger Penrose came at it from a different direction, starting off with definining space-time in a quantitized manner (spin networks, quantum foam, whatever you want to call it) which had the side effect that complex examples of spin networks acted a lot like 3-dimensional Euclidean space.
Once people started talking about space-time like this, math started showing up that helped describe events and the progression of events in this space-time, including the Euclidean path integral which attempts to measure the end result of an interaction of particles in this type of space-time.
(Good link talking about path integrals and how they were a problem with quantum definition of gravity: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/public/qg_qc.h
Anyways, it sounds like he's saying: All this new math is great and if the world were a simple place, yeah, black holes would probably have an event horizon and the math to prove it is simple.
But the world is more complex than you think and doing the math for "the real world" shows that the closer you get to the end result, the less and less predictable the end result will be, even though overall it looks like it has a defined end result (i.e. it looks like it _should_ have an event horizon). In reality it's constantly shifting around - and likely this amount of shifting around is representative of the original information/particle system that went into its formation but you won't be able to trace it backwards and extract what the original information was.
This will probably tie into time dialation which will make it be: We never get to the end result event horizon that 'should' be there and in the process of never getting there, the black hole will have a nice jiggly event horizon as a result of all that information - but so jiggly we can't tell what went in to it, all we can do is measure the jiggliness.
What he hasn't explained is how he knows this and the math behind it.
Crap I'm bored.
This quote evolved from a NYT interview with Einstein in 1919. The NYT sent its golf correspondent who made stuff up in his story, and these exaggerations made it in the headline of the article itself. I quote Bill Bryson in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (who in turn is quoting David Bodanis in "E=mc squared" (both of which I recommend...)
"Almost at once his theories of relativity developed a reputation for being impossible for an ordinary person to grasp. Matters were not helped... when the New York Times decided to do a story, and -- for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder -- sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.
Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong. Among the more lasting errors in his report was the assertion that Einstein had found a publisher daring enough to publish a book that only twelve men 'in all the world could comprehend'. There was no such book, no such publisher, no such circle of learned men, but the notion stuck anyway. Soon the number of people who could grasp relativity had been reduced even further in the popular imagination -- and the scientific establishment, in must be said, did little to disturb the myth." [He then mentions Eddington's "I'm trying to think of the third person" quote.]
Here's the link to the original 1919 NYT article. (yes, you have to pay, but you can see the headline for free...)
Also, here's
I believe he had a bet with Kip Thorne over whether Cygnus X1 was a black hole or not. Hawking said it wasn't and Thorne said it was. Hawking conceded the bet a while ago. It was for a subscription to playboy. Hawking said that he really thought that it was a black hole but wanted a consolation prize if it wasn't.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein