Steven Hawking Loses Bet On Black Holes? 477
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."
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
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Informative)
---Lane
WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
The full terms of the bet are more interesting (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
actually that was a different bet (Score:2, Informative)
Which Bet? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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
Re:What encyclopaedia (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dupe - NOT! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Integrity (Score:5, Informative)
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:Hawking is a bad gambler. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:old news (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No such word as "maths" (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No such word as "maths" (Score:5, Informative)
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=maths [reference.com]
Re:The man's got the Rep (Score:3, Informative)
Edward Witten is equally influential, with the distinction that he holds such influence both in the physics and the mathematics community.
Sir Michael Atiyah on Witten:
Re:Hawking for President!! (Score:3, Informative)
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:Winning a bet... (Score:2, Informative)
Much, much, much lower!
The Hawking radiation is completely specified by its temperature, which is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole. If the black hole's mass is more than around 1% of the Earth's mass (or 20 billionths of the sun's), its temperature is colder than the cosmic background radiation. It's actually gaining mass from the background faster than it loses mass by radiating. The universe has to get quite a bit colder before solar- and galactic-mass black holes start evaporating!
Re:Entropy? Implications for Beckenstein Bound? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not all he's cracked up to be... (Score:4, Informative)
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:1, Informative)
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.