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Steven Hawking Loses Bet On Black Holes?
Posted by
simoniker
on Thu Jul 15, 2004 07:04 AM
from the most-upsetting dept.
from the most-upsetting dept.
st1d writes "Looks like Steven Hawking might have to pay up on an old bet regarding black holes - seems his idea about them destroying information wasn't quite living up to his expectations: '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.' He's due to make a formal announcement July 21."
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Steven Hawking Loses Bet On Black Holes?
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Winning a bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.opaquelucidity.com/)
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:4, Funny)
As long as it isn't a stair climbing bet.
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday October 01 2004, @07:19AM)
From TFA...
"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.
It's a solution to this paradox that Hawking will be talking about.
Re:Which laws? (Score:5, Informative)
Look at it this way: if all the matter in the universe were condensed into a black hole which in doing so destroyed all the information about that matter, the universe would be less entropic than before the black hole consumed everything.
Hawking radiation was in fact initially proposed as a means of seeming to counteract that: the radiation emitted due to quantum pair formation at the event horizon was calculated so that the following was always true: the Hawking radiation contributed more entropy to the universe than the infalling matter could have contained. Considering that the event horizon increases with the mass of the black hole, the balance was maintained.
String theory, for several reasons, has changed some of the underlying theories, hence the upcoming speech.
Re:Which laws? (Score:5, Informative)
That is exactly wrong. Black holes radiate (no pun intended) a black-body spectrum, which is a spectrum of maximal entropy. This had been proven several different ways by the mid-seventies. If black holes destroyed information, which radiation, containing no information, would be the end of the story. (Pun intended, this time.) However, ...
In QM, physical processes are represented by "unitary operators", which cannot destroy information. If you're familiar with Liousville's theorem in classical mechanics, it's a bit like that.
Re:Which laws? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maximal entropy = maximum number of corresponding microstates. The universe is in just one of those microstates, not any of the others, so in selecting that microstate the Hawking radiation does actually represent an real flow of information.
If this is enough to guarantee that the Second Law of thermodynamics is obeyed, as the previous poster suggested, ie that
then there's no really fundamental reason why the whole thing shouldn't be compatible with a more fine-detailed, deterministic quantum description for the whole process.Can anyone here confirm that second-law inequality ?
Re:Which laws? (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary, it's a most valuable view, and very helpful for seeing why unitarity and/or determinism is fundamental to the Second Law, not in opposition to it.
It reminds us always to remember that the entropy is not a property of the universe itself, but rather it is a property of the description of the universe -- coarse-grained and inevitably simplified -- that we have chosen to adopt.
So, in the simplest terms, we think of the universe evolving from one of a set of initial microstates M1 through a complicated black-box operation to one of a set of subsequent microstates M2. Because of determinism, each initial state in M1 evolves to exactly one subsequent state in M2. But our description of the initial state -- in terms of macroscopic variables &c -- is not sufficient to identify the microstate. Our description is missing some of the information, and this is the entropy S1.
If we could perfectly map our whole initial distribution of possible states through the black box, microstate by microstate, then our final entropy would still be exactly S1, reflecting the deterministic evolution of that initial distribution of states. But inevitably we can't follow all of the shuffling in the black box in that detail, so some of our initial information ceases to be useful -- with the result that at the end of the process there is more information we are missing, so S2 >= S1.
So the Second Law inequality rests on two things: the total amount of information there is to know remains the same (because of the determinism); but the amount of useful information we actually have has fallen (because we couldn't follow the shuffling) -- and that is why the difference between the two, the entropy, the information we don't have, has increased (or at best remained the same). The second law does not conflict with the assumption of determinism: it depends on it.
This carries over directly to quantum mechanics, where the meaning of unitarity is essentially a guarantee that volumes in the phase space are preserved -- a grid of microstates maps forward to another grid of microstates the same size. Again, this does not conflict with the second law; it guarantees it.
In terms of the accounting, it's very important that the microstate of the Hawking radiation does represent information about the state of the universe, but information that we don't have.
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, has anyone every detected a black hole that wasn't gobbling up matter from a nearby source (e.g. a star). A lone black hole travelling in the void. Has anyone found such a beast?
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.maxbuyer.co.uk/)
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. If He answers your question, could you tell me what His
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~justkarl)
At first read, I couldn't tell if you were talking about Jesus or Stephen Hawking. But I'll bet they both have accounts here.
I found Jesus here... (Score:4, Funny)
http://slashdot.org/~stephenhawking [slashdot.org]
what do ya'll think now?
Re:Hawking is a bad gambler. (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Thursday November 11 2004, @12:40PM)
Re:Hawking is a bad gambler. (Score:5, Funny)
Not all he's cracked up to be... (Score:5, Interesting)
He is also good at taking credit for work that is not his own. He has on 2 occasions had to apologize to professor Jimmy York [cornell.edu] for claiming Jimmies ideas as his own. Rumor has it that Jimmy says Hawking has done it again, but has not yet apologized this time.
He and his main collaborator (Roger Penrose) are widely regarded as ass holes (actually referred to as the twin ass holes) who capitalize greatly on other peoples work without doing much themselves in the cosmology community.
Posted AC to protect my fiancé (a cosmology PhD student), the source of most of my info on Hawking...
Re:Not all he's cracked up to be... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not all he's cracked up to be... (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Sunday June 19 2005, @01:43PM)
Posted AC to protect my fiancé (a cosmology PhD student), the source of most of my info on Hawking..."
And precisely how wide is your fiancé?
I've dealt with Penrose and find him to be quite the opposite of this assessment. I've dealt far more with a "competitor" of his, Basil Hiley, who I'm certain would say the same.
Granted, writing a book about everything Roger Penroseish as an irrelevant introduction to a severely misguided "theory" on "consciousness" was a failure in the scientific sense, it was at least entertaining to those interested in tiling problems and such.
As to his "consciousness" theory (in quotes because it has yet to be objectively defined) when asked just how the brain went about processing the stuff he proposed, he responded "I have no idea. I'm just a physicist. That's why I came to talk with you psychology people."
I know people from the extreme opposite camp from Penrose in the field of "consciousness" studies, and doubt I could find any who considered him to be an asshole without making themselves into one in the process.
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, kids - when I was your age, I used to bet people in wheelchairs who couldn't even speak unassisted and take their money away.
Destroying info. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://trolltalk.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 24, @08:16AM)
Integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Informative)
(http://prube.com/)
---Lane
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.angeltowns2.com/members/mozilla/)
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday March 09 2007, @01:10PM)
Fry: So then my chair tilted backwards and I almost fell into this freezer thingy.
Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Chamber."
Fry: Instead of falling in and getting frozen, I missed and wanged my head.
Gore: Well it's obvious what should have happened. That wang to the head should have killed you.
Fry: Uh what?
Nichols: Let's finish the job.
Gore: No wait! There must be a peaceful -
[Nichols pushes Fry over]
Hawking: Hold him down.
Deep Blue: Check.
[Hawking runs Fry over with his wheelchair]
Fry: Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.wowarmory...r=Kirin+Tor&n=Alicja | Last Journal: Thursday December 04 2003, @09:13AM)
1. Disabilities affect your state of mind. Just as you think differently if you speak a different language or come from a different culture, the mere fact that you're disabled impacts ALL aspects of your life, directly or indirectly. Think of it this way: if you know, for example, that you will NEVER have a sex life and that you will NEVER go through the traditional dating/marriage male/female dynamic, how does that change you life? For better? For worse?
2. Disabilities usually come with ongoing pain. Sores from prolonged periods of sitting in a wheelchair. Muscle problems from over developed/under developed muscles due to 'incorrect' body posture. Rashes from your adult diapers. Pain is NOT a natural state, and will pervade all aspects of your personality. When my mother had a serious muscle injury that persisted for about 18 months, the constant pain changed her personality completely (for the worse). Many times this is the reason why elderly people seem cantankerous and cranky...this is not their natural disposition. They were not 'always this way'.
3. People with disabilities are needy. Some more than others. The best adjusted ones are people who have disabilities onset late in life, or the ones that somehow have the strength of will (plus physical capability) of being independent. But some do not/cannot become independent, and thus are need as a matter of living. In many disabled people, I've seen an amplified sense of demand and outrage at minor things. It also amplifies the 'me-me-me-me' attitude, which I interpret as a corrupted sense of self preservation.
I think the movie "My Left Foot" did a great job portraying all of the personality differences if you're looking for a good dramatised case study.
Short of it is: I don't doubt that Hawking is an a**hole. I would be a bit surprised if he wasn't, in all honesty. But try not to judge too harshly...despite his great intelligence I suspect his social skills are unique to himself and somewhat limited. In this case I prefer to feel pity for his first wife, and reserve judgment on the man.
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.cyberista.com/)
Everybody knows some really bad apples. In college, I knew a guy that pretty much represented everything you wrote. He was a demented fuckup. I remember hearing other disabled kids grumbling stuff like, "as long as that asshat exists, he's going to make things harder on everybody [who is disabled]."
Hawking is remarkable because of the severity of his disease. I can't imagine living in pain or without my wood but I know what the wheelchair is like and I know guys with the pain/wood issues that are happily married with children and paying their taxes every year.
It's always annoying to see somebody use "always" or "never". At
It's the scientific thing to do, as Hawking eloquently demonstrates. Furthermore, the disabled know what they are up against. There's no need to make things harder by putting observations from a limited pool of experience into the net. Peace.
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that he pep-talks himself all the time, just to get through a day. I'm certain that he will be seen by many as arrogant and intolerant. But if he were to be tolerant *of himself* he might well collapse into self-pity. Similarly if he were to loose his good (arrogant) opinion of himself.
I am only sporadically troubled by a chronic pain. I'm told that the first thing that people notice that lets them know that I'm in pain is that I become more cutting, and my humor turns blacker. I don't notice this, myself, but it's been reported to me by someone I trust, AND used to diagnose when I was in pain, so I'm fairly certain that it's accurate.
Re:an encyclopedia? (Score:5, Informative)
Penthouse Bet [k12.wa.us]
Word is that Kip's wife was seriously put out about the payoff. Some people just don't appreciate winning.
KFG
Of course, the second part of the bet requiring .. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course, the second part of the bet requiring (Score:5, Funny)
(http://pjt33.f2g.net/)
Re:Of course, the second part of the bet requiring (Score:5, Funny)
More proof (Score:3, Informative)
we are still guessing, we still have no real idea how the universe works
and anything is possible, just because we dont know how to do it doesnt mean its impossible, but we wont learn much from peering through the glass of this fishbowl we are living in and proclaiming we know how it all works
here's to improving guesswork for the next million years
From the article: (Score:3, Funny)
I wish he'd called them 'Fry Holes'.
The man's got the Rep (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/~Quirk/journal/ | Last Journal: Monday October 03 2005, @04:07PM)
I doubt there are few if any other scientists who could so influence his peers.
Re:The man's got the Rep (Score:5, Insightful)
I can think of any number of scientists in fields I'm vaguely familiar with that would be granted time to speak at a conference at short notice without much proof of what they are going to say.
However, *what* they say will still be up to intense scrutiny. There's nothing like proving an eminent scientist wrong or disproving an accepted theory to advance ones career in science...
Anyway, it's the same anywhere in society. If you have a good reputation, people will at least listen to you. They won't necessary agree, but they will be willing to listen...
I've spotted a mistake of his (Score:5, Funny)
Not really a mistake... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://icesurge.com/)
No, he really meant "therapist".
Re:The man's got the Rep (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like it's going to be accepted as the 'currently known correct view' without peer review. It's just a talk.
I like their sense of humor (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the sense of humor of these guys. Its comforting to know that there is something shared between some of the spectalcular minds and the rest of us that we can relate to.
I wonder about the transform that must happen with the information when it gos into a black hole. For example radio waves. Or maybe light or matter. How is that all preserved if it is only turned into the one kind of radiation? is it just transformed and maybe its original form lost? or say something else? If a spaceship were to fall into a black hole would not the information of that matter ever being a spaceship and say maybe occupants be obliterated?
The largest adult anime collection on the net [sharkfire.net]
Re:I like their sense of humor (Score:5, Funny)
So... Your encyclopedia has been thrown at the nearest blackhole... Since you proved me wrong, you'll be quite able to recover the information presented in it...
Re:Hooorah! (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://kombat.org/)
Uhm, this isn't the first time he's been wrong. Indeed, the whole field of science is built upon scientists making educated and well-reasoned theories, then trying to prove it wrong. Pretty much all of our presently widely-accepted rules have come about this way. Many of them are even still called "theories." For example, "The Theory of Flight" has not been conclusively proven as a "Law" yet. Ditto for the Theory of Relativity, the Theory of Evolution, and the Theory of Atoms. We accept most of these ideas as facts nowadays, but the truth is, they're actually still just theories that haven't been proven wrong yet.
Don't bet on black holes... (Score:5, Funny)
..the odds get longer the nearer you get to it.
:)
Re:I heard Hawking left his wife some time ago... (Score:4, Interesting)
More info here:
http://www.salon.com/books/log/1999/08/12/hawki
The full terms of the bet are more interesting (Score:5, Informative)
(http://dis29500.org/)
"Whereas Stephen Hawking has such a large investment in general relativity and black holes and desires an insurance policy, and wheras Kip Thorne likes to live dangerously without an insurance policy.
Therefore be it resolved that Stephen Hawking bets one years subscription to PENTHOUSE as against Kip Thorne's wager of a 4-year subscription to PRIVATE EYE, that Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole of mass above Chandrasekhar limit."
It was signed by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne.
for those not of these shores Penthouse is a top shelf soft porn mag and Private eye is a current affairs/political satyrical publication.
What encyclopaedia (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.houghi.org/)
The duo are expected to present Preskill with an encyclopaedia of his choice "from which information can be recovered at will".
The bet was about an encyclopaedia. The time when the bet was made that was still a lot of books. Later it became some discs. Now it is Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] or even the Internet, if you like.
So is he going to give a way an AOL CD?
Seriously, I wonder what he(or you) now sees as an encyclopaedia or something "from which information can be recovered at will".
Which Bet? (Score:3, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 23 2002, @05:38PM)
A number of years ago I saw a show where Hawking had mad a different bet with Kip Thorne concering the nature of black holes.
IIRC, the loser had to buy the winner a copy of Penthouse.
My world is crumbling (Score:3, Funny)
Bush wrong on the weapons of mass destruction.
I don't know who to believe in anymore.
Oh... (Score:5, Funny)
Great!
Why I read Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Hawkins is an interesting and cool guy (Actually so is Kip Thorne)
I wish I could tell my grandkids I won a bet against Steven Hawkins (or for that matter lost it)
I wonder if the encyclopedias will be on CD?
I like the sense of humor of these guys.
What a reputation! To be granted time to speak, without prior notice as to topic and specific content.
Wasn't he on Conan?
42
It's scary so many people think like me!
No I will not comment on donkeys or toner cartridges!
A note about the conference (Score:5, Interesting)
Hawking applied relatively late to speak at this conference, and so the announcement caught a lot of people by surprise. Only the abstract for the presentation has been made available so far, and it seems that his line of thinking revolves around demonstrating that a true event horizon never forms, simply an apparent horizon. For those who don't know about these things, an apparent horizon is a mathematical construct that allows one to place a strict lower bound on the location of an event horizon in classical general relativity. Since an event horizon is necessary for the paradox to hold, the lack of one seems to disprove the existence of the problem.
Who is this Steven Hawking fellow? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No such word as "maths" (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sincil.co.uk/)
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=maths [reference.com]
I wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday May 20 2003, @09:45AM)
That cheap bastard !!! (Score:5, Funny)
hawking:~> wget -r http://wikipedia.org | tar czf - | mail preskill@caltech.edu
Entropy? Implications for Beckenstein Bound? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought that the entropy of black holes was determined by the fact that the only information needed to describe it completely was its mass, charge, and spin. The entropy computed from this assumption is proportional to the area of the event horizon, and, hence, we get the Beckenstein Bound.
At least, that's what I thought. But if a black hole, in fact, contains information about everything that has fallen into it, wouldn't that affect its entropy, and hence imply that the Beckenstein Bound is wrong, and therefore overturn some very significant ideas resulting from the Beckenstein Bound, such as the Holographic Principle?
If that were the case, this would be a much bigger story than it appears to be, so what am I misunderstanding?
Re:Entropy? Implications for Beckenstein Bound? (Score:5, Informative)
Futurama quote (Score:5, Funny)
Stephen Hawking: "I call it a Hawking Hole."
Fry: "No fair! I saw it first!"
Stephen Hawking: "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?"
(And then here's the MP3 [gotfuturama.com] of this great quote.)
Uncertainty and Stiffness (Score:4, Funny)
Think of it as being like a load of tennis balls in a drainpipe: you stick one in your end, the next one squashes a bit, then moves a bit and recovers its shape, squashing the next one a bit, and so on. The molecules are not bonded to each other with absolute rigidity. And there is a quantum limit to how stiff matter could ever be.
Which fits right in with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, somehow or other. At least, it did when I was conducting experiments outside of the realms of physics and more into the domains of chemistry
* OK, two particles which always have opposite spin, blah blah blah, one in your lab, one in a spaceship several gigametres away, you expend an obscene amount of energy reversing the spin on yours, and the spin on the far one reverses at the exact same time. But so what? You can't use the phenomenon to impart any useful information to the other party. You already knew that the spins would always be opposite.
Tasteless, but true... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.bradheintz.com/ | Last Journal: Monday January 20 2003, @11:39AM)
When I was in college, some friends and I (all physics majors) were having a bull session about whether or when someone would cough up a Grand Unified Theory. It was eventually agreed that it would depend largely on when the good Dr. Hawking died.
At the time, I don't think any of us thought he would still be around at this late date. Anyway, glad to see he's still kicking (so to speak) and doing new work.
OK,
- B
Hawking's humor (Score:4, Interesting)
For a specific example he was talking about how he once gave a lecture in Paris about black holes, and after about 30 minutes realized that they didn't understand a thing he was talking about. It turned out that they thought he was talking about something obscene. He played off this for quite a while, ending with his dismissal of the black hole modled after string theory (fuzzball black holes) in which he claimed "A black hole has no hair... but this just confused the French even more"
it was quite something to watch one of the most brilliant minds in the world make jokes about the Simpsons and Star Trek while discussing Q-physics and whatnot.
Particles escaping black holes? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
James Gleick no fan... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if it's quite that vitriolic, but I remember reading it and thinking "wow, he's no fan of Hawking."
Gleick's new biography is on Issac Newton, so perhaps he will have something else to say about modern physicists in there, I haven't read it yet.
Re:how much was the bet? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html#210)
Re:Dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I'm a little surprised that the parent poster got moderated up for this. It's not "informative" (IMO of course) to just call something a dupe without checking.
Re:Dupe - NOT! (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.unspace.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday August 05 2004, @10:54AM)
The article from back in March talked about Samir Mathur's approach to the "Information Problem" with black holes. He uses string theory to show that the information may always be available and may, in fact, affect the "Hawking radiation" (the radiation that comes from black holes which allows them to evaporate - guess who discovered it?).
Hawking seems to be taking a different approach that is not dependant upon any particular theory like strings. The approach is especially interesting because it involves uncertainty in the position of the event horizon. Back in the early 70s, physicists noted a parallel between black holes and thermodynamics. One could assign a black hole "entropy" based on it's diameter. But since nothing could escape from a black hole, the black hole would have a "temperature" of absolute zero. This would result in a violation of thermodynamics. Most physicists were willing to accept this, but thanks to clues provided by the ability to extract energy from a rotating black hole, Hawking figured out that black holes did evaporate, which gave them a very low but non-zero "temperature." His basic analysis involved pair production near the event horizon - one particle would escape, one wouldn't, and the "invented" mass would need to be given up by the black hole. An alternative way of looking at the problem involved how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would make the exact location of the event horizon vary slightly.
Information theory has significant parallels with thermodynamics. One might argue that they are actually the same thing expressed differenntly, except that black holes have an "information temperature" of zero. This violates the equivalent law in information theory that black holes were thought to violate in thermodynamics.
Having learned from history, many folks thought that some way would be found to extract information from a black hole. Hawking made the bet against what he hoped was true. His thought was that, if he was wrong, at least he'd win something!
It's interesting that the solution to the information problem may actually involve the alternative path that solved the thermodynamic problems with black holes, and that the alternative way of looking at things (the string theory approach) involves the behavior of particles.
When physicists speak of "beauty" they are usually referring to some behavior that is symmetric. The solution to the information problem might be thought of as beautiful because of the symmetry with the solution to the thermodynamic problem.