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Stephen Hawking has shocked physicists by admitting “there are no black holes”. In a paper published online, Professor Hawking instead argues there are “grey holes”. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes—in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” he says in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes.He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed. He suggests that instead light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a...

An Indian theoretical physicist who questioned the existence of black holes and thereby challenged Stephen Hawking of Britain at last feels vindicated. But he is sad. Abhas Mitra, at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, was perhaps the first and the only scientist who had the guts to openly challenge Hawking of Cambridge University who is regarded by many as the modern-day Einstein. For over 30 years Hawking and his followers were perpetuating the theory that black holes -- resulting from gravitational collapse of massive stars -- destroy everything that falls into them preventing even light or information...

... Well, even 90 years isn't enough, it seems, so right now, we are entering new waters – the denial of some basic results of general relativity, our modern theory of gravity that has been around and available to everyone since 1916. So in the last week, hundreds of publications informed their readers that it's been "mathematically proven" that the big bang theory is wrong and the black holes don't exist. These nutty claims boil down to some papers by a crackpot named Ms Laura Mersini-Houghton (no, I really, really won't accept her doctorate) who had previously claimed that she...

The current thinking regarding black holes is that they have two very simple parts, an event horizon and a singularity. Because a probe cannot be sent inside a black hole to see what is truly going on, researchers have to rely on theories. The singularity theory suffers from what has come to be known as the "information paradox"—black holes appear to destroy information, which would seem to violate the rules of general relativity, because they follow rules of quantum mechanics instead. This paradox has left deep thinking physicists such as Stephen Hawking uneasy—so much so that he and others have...

Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...

To begin, I promise I was thinking about the Newsweek poll before I saw CrushKerry’s warning to watch out for the oversampling of Republicans. But I think that point is worth examining further. As CrushKerry observed, GOP respondents outweighed Democratic respondents in the poll, 374 to 303. With 300 Independents noted,that works out to 38.3% Republicans, 31.0% Democrats, and 30.7% Independents of the 977 total from the three. But the Newsweek poll states that 1,188 respondents were polled, with 1,088 Registered voters. And while the press release takes 20 pages to print and read, Newsweek doesn’t say, exactly, how those...