Stephen Hawking: 'There Are No Black Holes'

ananyo writes "Stephen Hawking has proposed a new solution to the black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years. The paradox troubles physicists because if the firewall scenario is correct, Einstein's general theory of relativity is flouted. But the classical theory black hole cannot be reconciled to the quantum mechanical prediction that energy and information can escape from a black hole. Now Hawking has proposed a tantalizingly simple solution to the paradox which allows both quantum mechanics and general relativity to remain intact — black holes simply do not have an event horizon to catch fire. The key to his claim is that quantum effects around the black hole cause spacetime to fluctuate too wildly for a sharp boundary surface to exist. As Hawking writes in his paper, 'The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.'"

Comments

Science!

[Sponge Bath]

Hawking: ...this means, in a sense, that there are no black holes. Only what I call "Hawking surfaces".
Layman: Does this mean it's possible to travel faster than the speed of light?
Hawking: Sure, why not.

Re:Science!

[Big Hairy Ian]

Right 1st "Black Holes exist"

Now Black Holes don't exist

*Kicks cat back into box and starts again!*

There is no spoon

[stewsters]

Do not try to reconcile the event horizon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There is no black hole.

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

That's it, science has failed once again. I'm going back to christianity.
lol

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Science is like comments on Slashdot. First you get modded +5 Insightful for saying something and then you get modded +5 Informative for replying to yourself that you were actually wrong.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[somersault]

Because religious people desperately want evidence that they can wave in the face of non believers to try to get them into their club. They will blindly refuse any evidence that doesn't agree with them of course. They're a bit like corporation funded researchers.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[Urza9814]

Do you fail at Christianity by dismissing the concept of eternity, or at physics by dismissing the second law of thermodynamics?

Not the OP, but you are seriously lacking in imagination if you can't conceive of any way to reconcile those two concepts.

Here's one: God exists outside of our universe. We're a virtual machine and God is the hypervisor. When we die our process is copied from one virtual machine to another which may have a radically different architecture.

Re:He's wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Data from the satellite orbiting Uranus confirms that the hole is, in fact, brown-ish

Re:The actual paper

[Anonymous Coward]

This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.

"Ok, you caught me, my mother is white, I'm a mulatto hole."

Re:Best news I've heard in a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we need another world-famous scientist to publish a paper claiming that there is no such thing as "leveraging our core competencies to provide added value to our internal and external customers within the new paradigms posed by cloud services" and I can die a happy man!

Re:Or maybe

[EvilSS]

No, at least according to Occam's browser plugin which states that any scientific theory first proposed in the comment section of a website is probably complete crap.

There is no Stephen Hawking

[fredrated]

- Black Hole

Re:But it is horribly wrong anyway.

[KingMotley]

If you add the mass of the egos of those on slashdot, that solves the whole galaxy missing mass problem.