Hawking Gracefully, Formally Loses Black Hole Bet 485
Liora writes "Today at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Cambridge University professor Stephen Hawking said in his talk titled The Information Paradox for Black Holes that he was wrong about the formation of an event horizon in a black hole, and that matter is not destroyed in a way defying subatomic theory, as he had previously believed. According to the talk's short, "the way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon." A New York Times story and a Wired story are available, both apparently based on Reuters information." (This is the formal announcement promised last week.)
BBC Article (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:BBC Article (Score:2, Interesting)
Seventy years ago, Einstein estimated that there were only two people in the world who understood general relativity, and he was one of them.
Re:BBC Article (Score:5, Interesting)
Seventy years ago, Einstein estimated that there were only two people in the world who understood general relativity, and he was one of them.
Einstein said that, at that time, only three people in the world understood General Relativity. When a reporter asked Arthur Eddington (the second best person that, in fact, did know general relativity) for confirmation, he replied that he could not recall the third one.
Re:Fails to give wheelchair ride? (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally have a handicap, and to be honest, I appreciate when people make jokes about it... I don't consider them cruel or offcolor, (except in the rare cases they are delivered with the intent of being cruel) to me its an acknowledgement of me as a person that someone can still treat as an equal. I doubt that there are many people who don't hold Hawking in extremely high esteem, and I in no way believe comments made by people who respect him in refference to his handicap would offend him, rather the people who try to ignore the obvious.
Re:Good for Hawking (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never been very tolerant of arrogant professors. They often believe they can't be wrong, and that it's absurd to suggest that there's an alternative to their way of thinking.
I've also seen professors claim others' ideas as their own.
Re:Hawking and his books. (Score:2, Interesting)
Several years ago (well, it's probably more like 10 now...ugh) I saw Hawkings give a lecture aimed at the layman to a packed theatre. It was really very impressive -- despite the nature of what he was talking about and his physical limitations, he was engaging, humourous, and very understandable. He's a credit to his field and science in general -- not only through his intellectual achievements, but also through the class and humanity with which he conducts himself.
Re:Fails to give wheelchair ride? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Baloney! (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me tell you about how theoretical physics really works. Quantum THEORY is just that, a theory. But it has been tested to unbelievable precision. Using the theory of quantum electrodynamics, one can calculate constants of nature from first principles to better than 12 decimal places. These theories are "right," even though there might be some improvement or refinement that comes along later.
That's the end of my general rant. Now to address specific things you said that were, quite ironically, complete baloney. You say general relativity (GR) hasn't been tested. Einstein's first prediction using GR concerned the deflection of light around the sun during an eclipse. His prediction was different from what others were saying, and when the eclipse of 1919 finally came, Einstein was vindicated. GR passes major experimental test #1.
Do you have GPS in your car? If you do, you may be surprised to know that those things rely on the mathematics of GR. Without taking into account some of the terms that pop out of the equations of GR, your GPS would never be able to locate you. But it can, and hence GR passes experimental test #2 with flying colors.
Finally, I point you to the Nobel Prize's page on Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor [nobel.se]. They found experimental proof that two stars orbiting each other were decaying at a rate exactly in accordance to what had been predicted years before. This is a very stringent test of the validity of GR -- the stars were orbiting each other near the "strong field" where gravitational effects are really strong, and hence where any deviation from the behavior predicted by the theory should be obvious -- and, once again, GR passed the test like an Asian kid taking math.
A certain amount of skepticism is always healthy, of course. Do I think there will be eventual refinements to GR? Of course, probably in the form of superstring theory [superstringtheory.com]. But before you go around proclaiming that it's all baloney, you better figure out what you're talking about.
Not entirely unanticipated? (Score:5, Interesting)
What Hawking seems to be saying to me is that since the matter never enters the hole from the perspective of an observer outside the hole, the information is never lost. Does this make sense?
Re:Like Einstein? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, a number of very accurate clever experiments have been going on in the past decade or two to prove if the electric field in Coulomb's Law really goes as 1/r^2. These experiments have shown that it goes as 1/r^n where the error bars are tiny, but still enclose '2'. [Sorry, too lazy to look up the actual uncertainty numbers.]
Some people might think this is a waste of time, but if it was shown n=1.99999997 that would be a HUGE deal, and would require a re-write not only of Maxwell's laws, but of quantum field theory, and the standard model too.
Re:BBC Article (Score:5, Interesting)
I replied that physics IS really hard, and relies on a strong mathematical basis, and thus entails lots and LOTS of math. His counterreply was that this was questionable, and that one COULD be a physicist without going through the math. And he proceeded to tell me how he read Copernicus and Galileo's writings in one of his supposed 'physics' classes.
I tried to explain that without math, physics would be philosophical conjecture. Actually, physics WAS philosophy back in the day, it was called "natural philosophy". However, they diverged, the mathetically and experimentally based one becoming physics (and chemistry and biology, etc). Funny quote - one of my professors remarked that "Physics is Philosophy with Integrals."
Anyway, it was a weird situation. Although he did finally come around and told me that he realized without math, physics would be just bullshit. But he was convinced there was a much easier way to teach advanced physics than with lots of equations.
Re:He just doesn't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, yes, but it's a solution to a philosophical problem that doesn't necessarily exist. Scientific laws are absolutely nothing more than expressions of an observed pattern. There is no empirical basis to claim that the pattern observed must always hold in all situations. Some believe that it does and that the laws of science can, in principle, be refined to the point where they are perfect predictors in all cases (possibly factoring in uncertainty), but that is more of a philosophical axiom than a scientific conclusion.
Anyway, the point here is that, philosophically, God is not bound by the laws of science. If God created and controls the universe, it is philosophically valid to view the laws of science as regularities we have observed in the way God choose for things to unwind. At one job, I used to quite consistently wear a T-shirt to work always and only on Fridays, and a co-worker joked that he didn't need a calendar to tell whether the weekend was coming up; he could just look at what I was wearing. This was a perfectly regular behavior according to his observations; he could have made a mathematical formula to predict it. However, if he had, this would not have in any way forced me to wear a T-shirt on Fridays or to wear something different on other days. Going back to God, when God behaves in a way that doesn't fit the expectations and that makes an exception to natural law, this is known as a "miracle".
On the other hand, uncertainty gives a whole extra level of leeway. Suddenly, there are an infinite number of possible "correct" ways (according to the laws of physics) for events to unfold, so as long as God chooses one of them, his actions don't disturb the natural order that has been established. (Why God would want to do this is another question, but one possible answer is to avoid making things so irregular that we cannot plan our lives and have some measure of control over what goes on around us. If we couldn't do that, it would be pretty chaotic and hard for finite creatures like humans to cope with.)
Also on this subject, there is the fascinating (to me) question of whether it's possible to create perfect physical laws and have all the necessary data to predict future events and have this all happen within the universe. This gets into all kinds of fun things like information content, density, etc., and it touches on the field of data compression. One thing we learn from data compression is that there is no such thing as a lossless compression algorithm that *always* compresses its input. (If there were, the consequences would include the ability to infinitely compress all files, and the ability to solve the unsolveable Halting Problem.)
But, it is still possible to create a lossless algorithm that losslessly compresses some inputs and losslessly expands others. So, to extrapolate (somewhat wildly) to the physical universe, it would seem the case that the universe cannot predict itself in all possible universes, but it may be possible that some universes could exists where it'd be possible to perfectly model the universe (and thus predict the future, etc.) from within the universe. If we should somehow discover that we live within one of those universes, then would really could fit the entire universe into our brains! Or at least some larger system that involves brains, computers, etc. It would be incredibly surprising to find out that we do live in such a universe though. (Which would be nice if it happened, since thenceforth nothing else would ever have to be surprising.) Anyway, the point is my gut tells me we cannot perfectly model the universe from within the universe, although it is not proven.
Re:Well... Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, this [hawking.org.uk] is the proper link
god and science reconcile perfectly. (Score:3, Interesting)
(i'm agnostic or something, definitely not xtian though)
Re:Yikes (Score:3, Interesting)
The NYT sent a golf reporter to interview Einstein (Score:2, Interesting)
"Almost at once his theories of relativity developed a reputation for being impossible for an ordinary person to grasp. Matters were not helped... when the New York Times decided to do a story, and -- for reasons that can never fail to excite wonder -- sent the paper's golfing correspondent, one Henry Crouch, to conduct the interview.
Crouch was hopelessly out of his depth, and got nearly everything wrong. Among the more lasting errors in his report was the assertion that Einstein had found a publisher daring enough to publish a book that only twelve men 'in all the world could comprehend'. There was no such book, no such publisher, no such circle of learned men, but the notion stuck anyway. Soon the number of people who could grasp relativity had been reduced even further in the popular imagination -- and the scientific establishment, in must be said, did little to disturb the myth." [He then mentions Eddington's "I'm trying to think of the third person" quote.]
Here's the link to the original 1919 NYT article [pqarchiver.com]. (yes, you have to pay, but you can see the headline for free...)
Also, here's