Stephen Hawking Suggests Black Holes Are Possible Portals To Another Universe (scienceworldreport.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article on Science World Report: Stephen Hawking, in a recent lecture held at the Harvard University, claimed that black holes could be portals to a parallel universe. The celebrated physicist spoke at length about black holes and suggested that they neither store materials absorbed by them nor physical information about the object that created them. Known as the information paradox, the theory goes against the scientific rule that information on a system belonging to a particular time can be used to understand its state at a different time. Over the years, it has been speculated that black holes do not retain information about the stars from which they are formed, except storing their electrical charge, angular momentum and mass. According to Hawking, as per that theory, it was believed that identical black holes might be formed by an infinite quantity of matter configurations. However, quantum mechanics has signaled the opposite by revealing that black holes could only be formed by particles with explicit wavelengths. If the characteristics of the bodies that create black holes are not deprived, then they include a lot of information that is not revealed to the outside world, according to the physicist. "For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism, that is that the laws of science determine the evolution of the universe" Stephen Hawking said. If information was lost in black holes, we wouldn't be able to predict the future because the black hole could emit any collection of particles."This is in contrast to some of Hawking's earlier views. In 2014, for instance, Hawking suggested that black holes don't exist, at least not like we think.

Comments

Re:Sane people suggest

[Rei]

It's not "waffling", Slashdot's lack of understanding of cosmology notwithstanding.

What Hawking said in 2014 was that black holes - in the context of disjoint regions of space irrevocably disconnected from our spacetime - do not exist.
What Hawking is said now is... the same thing.

Hawking did waffle on black holes, once; he was once of the view that information was lost irretrievably beyond the event horizon, but he conceded based on a large scientific debate that arose that this view was mistaken. While he's certainly refined the details of the mechanism and consequences since then (as have the many other cosmologists working on the problem), his overall view has not changed.

A big area of debate which caused the "refining" was the so-called "firewall" paradox, which pointed out a variety of fundamental problems that come when you try to reconcile an effectively disjoint region of spacetime with the concept of information leaking out. The resolutions have been increasingly that black holes aren't nearly as disjoint as they first appeared to be.

Honestly, with the way things are headed, I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up with is nothing more than a dilationary inflation gravity near the event horizon that leads to infalling matter being bent into a flat spacetime at the event horizon - not just a case of "no event horizon", but no singularity either. I've seen some work on this in the past, and it really would make a lot of the "weirdness" of the universe (from black holes to the Big Bang) become a lot less weird. The unification of black holes, inflation and the Big Bang leads to what I find to be a very satisfying "fate of the universe" scenario... the universe "bangs", black holes ultimately form, they drift unthinkably far apart over unfathomably long timespans, then they in turn bang in the exact same manner, creating new universes of their own. And contrary to how it may at first seem (that each new universe would be a small fraction the size of its parent), this wouldn't inherently be the case, as we also have dark energy in the picture.

But that's just my take :)

(Flat spacetime isn't really that weird... we live in spacetime that is, on the large scale, flat)