Hawking cracks black hole paradox

NewScientist ^ | 14 July 2004 | Jenny Hogan

[Sloth]

I rather enjoyed seeing Tim Robbins freezing instantly......Was the best part of the movie......

Sure, but how much better would it have been to see him writhing in agony as his eardrums ruptured & he began soundlessly coughing up gouts of blood?

[Professional Engineer]

Interesting

[LonePalm]

Bang, Bang, Maxwell's Silver Hammer came down on their heads.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[maxwell]

"information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden, and can never be revealed".

Intuitively, to this non-cosmologist, it makes sense that this would not be entirely true. "Forever" and "never" are approximations, to some order...

[Xenalyte]

Hmmm . . . so you are, so you are. So much for that theory.

[sweetliberty]

Thought this might interest you.

[Constitution Day]

Anything involving Hawking is newsworthy.

Bump to that. Very interesting.

[MHGinTN]

Nice post. As you say, anything where Stephen makes such a blunt assertion is news worthy.

[jennyp]

At the conference, Hawking will have an hour on 21 July to make his case.

Will that be enough time? Especially if he takes questions?

[malakhi]

"On second thought, let's go back to dark and try again tomorrow. I'm not much of a morning Deity."

In Judaism, the day begins at sunset. ;o)

[Mike-o-Matic]

I'll see your Event Horizon (no pun intended) and raise you something even cheezier: Disney's "The Black Hole."

That's right, it was SO bad, I had to spell "Cheezier" with a "Z."

[AmishDude]

I'm just a mathematician, but I have to ask:

Do you people have ANY idea what you're doing? It seems the theories swing wildly from one end to the other and nobody bats an eye.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Hawking's theories aren't swinging very wildly. The main aspects of black holes are the same as before. One point is that the escape velocity from a black hole is greater than the velocity of light (Newtonian gravity also has black holes; however, Newton's theory doesn't predict that one cannot travel fast enough to escape.) The question is how much knowledge about the particles that fall into such a region can be recovered. As Physicist pointed out, there are a large number of theories compared to the experiments necessary to separate them.

[Xenalyte]

Wow, that IS cheezy. I see your Black Hole and raise you . . . um . . . what's a dreadful movie about outer space . . . oh, yeah, THIS.

[AmishDude]

Now I understand how it works. Very unlike mathematics.

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the ping.

[js1138]

evaporating placemarker.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I'm not sure why you feel it's unlike mathematics. (Unless you mean the necessity of experimental or observational verification.)

[AmishDude]

I would call it the "wussy real world". :)

It's very unlike mathematics. We have conjecture/theorem/PROOF. Right or wrong.

You have guess/model/experiment/new-guess-completely-unrelated-to-old-guess/model/experiment/tweaking-of-guess-but-who-really-knows-anyway-and-why-did-I-get-into-this-when-we-can't-fully-understand-the-universe-anyway.

[Doctor Stochastic]

That's what separates science from mathematics.