Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole

Posted by Soulskill on from the try-enhanced-interrogation-techniques dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have figured out a way for information to leave a black hole. He presented his theory today at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Scientists have struggled with the black hole information paradox for years, and Hawking thinks this new theory could be a solution. He said, "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon." Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia: You wouldn't technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you'd have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota." Information can leave the black hole via Hawking radiation, though it will be functionally useless. Hawking worked with Cambridge's Malcolm Perry and Harvard's Andrew Stromberg on this theory.

2 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. So now we have a new paradox... by bobbied · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hawking in all his brilliance has produced a new paradox trying to solve another? How's that help anything? This is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

    So now we have information that's "useless" because we won't be able to unscramble it, but no information is lost? It's like saying that the information on my degaussed and melted down backup disk drive is *still* there, if I just knew how to reassemble it properly. That backup disk is just a pile of slag, the information it contained is gone. I'm sorry, that sure looks like we lost information to me... The net effect is the same as the information being lost, so I don't see how this stroke of genius helps the problem beyond moving the paradox to having the information preserved but unrecoverable by any possible means.

    Try again sir... You didn't solve anything here.

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    1. Re:So now we have a new paradox... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think the point is that the information is there, but it would require a tremendous amount of energy to reassemble it, much more than, say, putting humpty-dumpty back together again. That's not a paradox.

      I'm not a physicist, but the holographic principle has been around for a long time; it's conjectures that a black hole is a 2-dimensional object--there's no space on the other side of the event horizon, the event horizon _is_ the blackhole. And others have suggested that information can leak via fluctuations at the boundary. Any physicists care to distinguish what's truly novel with this new theory?