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."
Winning a bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
an encyclopedia? (Score:2, Interesting)
The man's got the Rep (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt there are few if any other scientists who could so influence his peers.
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?
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Re:Winning a bet... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Winning a bet... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Integrity (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, reading after his biography (sorry can't remember which one) I got the feeling he was not really a very nice person at all. He came across as extremely arrogant and intolerant. True, he's been through and overcome a lot, but the way he treated people around him was not very nice at all.
Re:Hooorah! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The man's got the Rep (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt there are few if any other scientists who could so influence his peers.
Playing devil's advocate, is it a good thing? Shouldn't all work be taken on merit and nnot hearsay? Admittedly this is a lightly different situation since Stephen Hawking undoubtedly does actually know what he is talking about in this field, but I can't help feeling that it undermines some of the fundamental scientific principles?
Re:Integrity (Score:3, Interesting)
Having never met him I'd be loathe to criticise, but anecdotal evidence does suggest he's a grade A egotistical wanker. Or as Fox would put it, "Some people say he's a baby-eating wheeled menace who should be ejected into space; you decide".
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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:Integrity (Score:2, Interesting)
It is like explaining that 2 X 2 = 4 and 3 X 3 = 9 and after spending another hour talking about powers and logarithms people would ask you: 'Yeah, and by the way what is 2 X 3, again?'
I am being serious. Anyone who tought in college would know how frustrating it might be sometimes.
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...
Information is not physical (Score:2, Interesting)
lol, slashdot lots stupid now. (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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: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
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.
Question about black hole formation (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's say I'm watching something (a gigantic encyclopedia, say) collapse to form a black hole.
As the object collapses, its gravitational field gets stronger, and therefore, as observed from my vantage point, the time dilation effect gets stronger. i.e. From my perspective, the collapse proceeds ever more slowly. Although it never stops collapsing, I don't believe I would observe it actually turn into a black hole in a finite amount of time.
From the point of view of someone standing on the surface of the object, the reverse happens -- time in the universe outside seems to accelerate, to the point where the universe ends before the black hole is created.
So... my question is... are black holes actually formed in the universe, from our perspective? Or are there just a bunch of objects that look almost exactly, but not quite, like black holes (because they've been collapsing for billions of years)? Or were all the black holes created in the big bang? Or is there some neat trick that allows a nearly-black-hole to flip into a really-black-hole?
Sorry for the slight digression... it's just a question that's been bugging me for years.
Bruce
Particles escaping black holes? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.