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

Some poeple just hate to lose a bet

[atouk]

Does that mean that he gets his $100 back he lost to John Preskill?

Or maybe

[symbolset]

The event horizon oscillates faster than the speed of light over a greater distance than quantum tunneling can occur. Inbound light would follow the wavefront in, only to become trapped as the next wave built outside its escape range.

Re:But it is horribly wrong anyway.

[Will.Woodhull]

Interesting troll. A bit heavy handed, though. If I were to grade it, if it was written by a high school student it would get a C+, if written by a college student, it would rate a D- (barely passing).

Point of interest: the Copenhagen convention suggests that there is no possibility of a physics Out There. That all physicists can do is make mental models of whatever reality might be, and play around with those models, since reality itself is unobservable without the distortions of observer bias. There are some things we think we know, and there are some things that we know that we can never know (such as what is happening in close proximity to a singularity, or why is Pi 3.14159... and not something else). And it turns out that because there are some things that we know we can never know, we can't be sure about any of the things we think we know.

So, yes, AC is completely correct: relativity is wrong. Also quantum mechanics is wrong. Also classical physics is wrong. It is all wrong. So what? Asking whether this stuff is right or wrong is asking the wrong question. The right questions to ask of any physics model are: How useful is it, and what is its scope of usefulness?

We are the tool using monkeys. We are not Gods. Don't sweat the Really Big Stuff. Do something with the tools: make more tools, make some fun toys and games. That's what we do best. And, that's all that we can do.

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[rgbatduke]

Indeed, many specific religions go two steps further even than that. They begin with a self-referential statement affirming the perfect truth of the religious scripture, which is true because it is part of the religious scripture. Then, as you say, anything that is contained in that religious scripture is perfectly true, by definition, no matter how apparently internally inconsistent (contradictions within the scripture), externally inconsistent (contradictions with simple matters of fact derived from reason and observation), morally inconsistent (contradictions with accepted morality, e.g. is or isn't slavery good, is marriage by rape and a payment of 50 shekels morally acceptable, is it morally just to slaughter Midianite women and children except for the young female virgins and to subject them to rape and slavery, should we kill old women accused of being witches given that there is no such thing as an actual witch).

Since some of these things offend mere common sense to an enormous extent, religion has invented "hermeneutics" and "exegesis" as complex forms of interpretation of scriptural text whose sole purpose is to reduce the extreme cognitive dissonance induced by trying to believe that A and Not A are simultaneously true when they happen to be written in a religious text. Doublethink is alive and well and living in a religion near you.

The second step that they add is that in ordinary discourse and the usual scientific investigative process that we used to systematically refine a consistent set of beliefs in reasonable agreement with evidence, the only penalties associated with being wrong are natural ones that consistently fit in with the general framework of the scientific worldview -- if you fail to believe that the law of gravitation will apply to you and step off of the roof of a tall building, it is likely to be the last experiment you ever perform (likely in a specific and defensible sense, since of course it might always be the case that you have been sprinkled with fairy dust or have accomplished a sufficiently strong belief in The Force that the force of gravity does not cause you to splatter at the bottom of a long drop, it has just never been observed to be the case and is hence very unlikely from a Bayesian point of view at least). In the religious worldview, however, there is an entire hidden world where things happen that we cannot observe but that are precisely and correctly delineated in the aforementioned scripture. It is a second issue because religion makes many pronouncements on matters that cannot ever be contradicted by experience -- indeed, it revels in this and claims it as its "higher" ground.

So when a divinely inspired, perfectly true (if only after massive "interpretation") religious scripture tells you that if you fail to believe that every word in that scripture that the scripture itself assures you is perfectly true is, in fact, true, you will be cast into a fiery pit so that your skin can be burned off of your living body and then instantly regrown to be burned off again, repeated to infinity and beyond, it is self-consistently guaranteed to be true. The Quran tells us so. The New Testament tells us so perhaps a bit less graphically. The general texts of Hinduism assure us that unbelievers who fail to obey its precepts will be reincarnated as intestinal parasites living in a dog or the like.

The core of most scripture-based religious belief is, in fact, supernatural posthumous extortion in the form of events that cannot ever be objectively verified but that are so extreme that they tempt even the rational to make Pascal's Wager, coupled with a system of equally unverifiable posthumous rewards for those who meekly acquiesce in the entire ball of scriptural wax and the consequent transfer of political power, social status, and wealth to the priesthood tasked with "interpreting" the very scriptures that, after all, are perfectly true. They say so, and if you don't believe (perhaps because yo