Posted on 07/14/2004 12:22:21 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.
The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.
It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This "Hawking radiation" contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.
But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.
Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this "fuzzball" does contain information about the insides of a black hole (New Scientist print edition, 13 March).
Big reputation
Now, it seems that Hawking too has an answer to the conundrum and the physics community is abuzz with the news. Hawking requested at the last minute that he be allowed to present his findings at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland.
"He sent a note saying 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it'," says Curt Cutler, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, who is chairing the conference's scientific committee. "I haven't seen a preprint [of the paper]. To be quite honest, I went on Hawking's reputation."
Though Hawking has not yet revealed the detailed maths behind his finding, sketchy details have emerged from a seminar Hawking gave at Cambridge. According to Cambridge colleague Gary Gibbons, an expert on the physics of black holes who was at the seminar, Hawking's black holes, unlike classic black holes, do not have a well-defined event horizon that hides everything within them from the outside world.
In essence, his new black holes now never quite become the kind that gobble up everything. Instead, they keep emitting radiation for a long time, and eventually open up to reveal the information within. "It's possible that what he presented in the seminar is a solution," says Gibbons. "But I think you have to say the jury is still out."
Forever hidden
At the conference, Hawking will have an hour on 21 July to make his case. If he succeeds, then, ironically, he will lose a bet that he and theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena made with John Preskill, also of Caltech.
They argued that "information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden, and can never be revealed".
"Since Stephen has changed his view and now believes that black holes do not destroy information, I expect him [and Kip] to concede the bet," Preskill told New Scientist. The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will".
When I was a grad student in statistics, I almost took a course in information theory offered by the stats department, but couldn't fit it in my schedule. Would that course have dealt with yet a different kind of information? Confusing!
Does or can a plasma field form or exist in a black hole?
Does gravity's properties remain constant, or change when acted on by extreme mass and energy? Does the square root law still apply?
Can a black hole reach saturation?
Hawking implies that the process ends at some point. What is the end result? End of a phase? Beginning of a transformation? Creation?
I gots lotsa questions..
Yes, it was my hope when I first read this article that Hawkings' new results would at least in principle let us peer inside black holes and figure out what the laws of physics are inside. But I can't figure out if that's in the cards based on these articles . . . Oh, well, we'll learn more when he holds his conference!
The Remarkable Slowness of Light
More articles in the news and views archive.
Keep asking questions....Electric Universe is : )
It took SH for us to find black holes. But his theory was only that, theory.
Since we cannot enter a black hole "WE" cannot get information. It is not that SH is wrong. It is just like all science, more information, better technology, allows for more details.
SH would be where he is wheelchair or no, he is one who uses his brain, he thinks.
Newton did not invent the telescope. It was a toy and he stole the idea and sold it to the Navy as his own. but he did make better lenses.
What makes SH better is the fact that there is math that has yet to be considered. It took a girl just a year or so ago to solve a math problem that mathmeticians could not do for centuries.
The difference is that SH will say he was wrong flat out, other scientists never admit that, they just say they there thoery "evolved"
After trying "all" the computer models they could think of about the formation of planets they all worked on the planets except Uranus and Neptune, for some reason the Gas Giants do not allow themsleves to be figured out yet.
Once they "solve" that little problem it may completely change the way in which the universe sould have been formed.
Only time and technology will tell.
information-where-none-was-expected placemarker
It will be as soon as the Whoppi Goldberg jokes start.
Yes, but not in this thread, unfortunately. I've never seen such an intellectual mess in a cosmology thread. I'm outta here!
You mean you don't have those? Well, my planet-buster is on back order, but I'm getting a red one with a cool racing stripe.
Does this mean Lagrange points, or something else?
Myself am still learning this...am over in the Electric Universe camp...Plasma Cosmology.
Article link :
more info in the niews and views archives.
Since we're talking gravity here as much as GR, I would expect that is the case..
There should be Lagrangian points, but as to how they apply, I am not enough of a science whiz to say..
I'm not sure if 2 masses are required, ( Earth & moon ) or only one..
Thanks for the article! What does the Yilmaz modification then imply about the GR notion that as you approach light speed, that mass approaches infinity, requiring exponential increases in thrust energy to continue acceleration.
Aha! Or should I say, Eureka!
Hope this link answers your question...hope you enjoy the chalkboard : )
Yilmaz and Cosmology...Light Speed..Densities..and all that :)
Yilmaz....the speed of light and the contraction of distance is the same for all directions.
Density of matter in the Universe.....Yilmaz's figures.
Being over in the Electric Universe camp does change *origen of matter perspective....their view of gravity is divergent from previous theories.
Revision after discovery appears to be the season upon us as they say... GR..Yilmaz and E.U. are going to undergo revision as man learns.
so ya..the debate...weak and strong gravity.
what mechanism is progenitor/catalyst in this.
Halton Arp has shown that Red Shift does not equal age...but energy emmision.
In the same quadrant of space....different red shifts..
Uniform age ident fails here.
Electric Universe explores the diverent energy emission issue...then comments.."its how you read the energy emssions".
Yilmaz at least comments in similar vien with E.U...as per *State.
Yilmaz theory predicts that there are no black holes. A massive star may collapse to a state more dense than a neutron star, but it never reaches the pathological black hole state of a time-frozen event horizon cloaking a singularity.
and
At first glance, this prediction would appear to be fatal to Yilmaz relativity. The headlines from recent astronomical observations, particularly those with the new x-ray and gamma ray telescopes, are said to have confirmed the existence of black holes. However, careful examination shows that the new data confirms the existence of collapsed stars that have extremely hot accretion disks and are too massive to be neutron stars. That observation is compatible with Yilmaz relativity. There has never been an indication of actual event horizon. In fact, up to now there have been no astronomical observation that would falsify the Yilmaz version of general relativity.
In a past thread....mentioned revision which is occuring.
PDF files on the internet...Aricebo's H1 Stellar Cartography assay...what was formerly worded as.."Background Radiation" ..is now being revised.
They have noted the strong *Electrical signature as *Background...leaning more toward Electric Universe's construct.
With Plasma/Electric ident being considered...now Arps view of Red Shift comes into focus.
State...densities..velocity vectors,..spacial time.
all this is undergoing revision.
Wish I was really smart to just cut single paragraph answers...its all to complex and interconnected.
I find its best to forward source links and let others run with the mouse and a cup of Java. : )
He didn't use placebos?
The claim that vitamin C is useful in the treatment of cancer is largely attributable to Linus Pauling, Ph.D. During the mid-1970s, Pauling began claiming that high doses of vitamin C are effective in preventing and curing cancer. In 1976 and 1978, he and a Scottish surgeon, Ewan Cameron, reported that a group of 100 terminal cancer patients treated with 10,000 mg of vitamin C daily had survived three to four times longer than historically matched patients who did not receive vitamin C supplements [61-62]. However, Dr. William DeWys, chief of clinical investigations at the NCI, found that the patient groups were not comparable. The vitamin C patients were Cameron's, while the other patients were managed by other physicians. Cameron's patients were started on vitamin C when he labeled them "untreatable" by other methods, and their subsequent survival was compared to the survival of the "control" patients after they were labeled untreatable by their doctors. DeWys found that Cameron's patients were labeled untreatable much earlier in the course of their disease-which meant that they entered the hospital before they were as sick as the other doctors' patients and would naturally be expected to live longer [63]. Nevertheless, to test whether Pauling might be correct, the Mayo Clinic conducted three double-blind studies involving a total of 367 patients with advanced cancer. All three studies found that patients given 10 g of vitamin C daily did no better than those given a placebo [64-66]. Despite many years of taking huge daily amounts of vitamin C, both Pauling and his wife Ava died of cancer -- she in 1981 and he in 1994.
61. Cameron E, Pauling L. Supplemental ascorbate in the supportive treatment of cancer: prolongation of survival times in terminal human cancer. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 73:3685-3689, 1976.
62. Cameron E, Pauling L. Supplemental ascorbate in the supportive treatment of cancer: reevaluation of prolongation of survival times in terminal human cancer. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 75:4538-4542, 1978.
63. DeWys WD. How to evaluate a new treatment for cancer. Your Patient and Cancer 2(5):31-36, 1982.
64. Creagan ET and others. Failure of high-dose vitamin C (ascorbic acid) therapy to benefit patients with advanced cancer. A controlled trial. New England Journal of Medicine 301:687-690, 1979.
65. Moertel CG and others. High-dose vitamin C versus placebo in the treatment of patients with advanced cancer who have had no prior chemotherapy. A randomized double-blind comparison. New England Journal of Medicine 312:137-141, 1985.
66. Tschetter L and others. A community-based study of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in patients with advanced cancer. Proceedings of the American Society of Clinical Oncology 2:92, 1983.
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