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Science

Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole 172

An anonymous reader writes: Physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have figured out a way for information to leave a black hole. He presented his theory today at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Scientists have struggled with the black hole information paradox for years, and Hawking thinks this new theory could be a solution. He said, "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon." Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia: You wouldn't technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you'd have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota." Information can leave the black hole via Hawking radiation, though it will be functionally useless. Hawking worked with Cambridge's Malcolm Perry and Harvard's Andrew Stromberg on this theory.
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Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole

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  • so? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    chuck norris doesn't escape from black holes.

    they escape from HIM.

    • chuck norris doesn't escape from black holes.

      they escape from HIM.

      Everything "escapes" from Chuck Norris. The Big Bang was caused by one of his round-house kicks.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Not everything.

        One day Chuck Norris walked down the street with an erection. There were no survivors.

      • chuck norris doesn't escape from black holes.

        they escape from HIM.

        Everything "escapes" from Chuck Norris. The Big Bang was caused by one of his round-house kicks.

        Wrong they were created when Bruce Lee accidentally farted. And that is why Hawking radiation is hard to intercept and read. Which only happens in the distorted time space long before the event horizon forms around black holes and is only created at energy levels much closer to the energy levels required to create the time space distortion created by a Bruce Lee fart not just a cheezy Chuck Norris kick!

    • Re:so? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by meglon ( 1001833 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @12:43AM (#50393181)
      You know why there isn't a Bruce Lee meme like the Chuck Norris meme? Bruce Lee wasn't a joke.
      • That may explain why I've heard of Bruce Lee, but not heard of Chuck Norris. I don't think I've got any of their LPs though.
  • Leonard Susskind. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:02PM (#50391551)

    "Hawking's new idea is that the information doesn't make it inside the black hole at all. Instead, it's permanently encoded in a 2D hologram at the surface of the black hole's event horizon".

    Uh, isn't that basically Susskind's idea? The holographic principal and all.

    • Re:Leonard Susskind. (Score:4, Informative)

      by MouseTheLuckyDog ( 2752443 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:50PM (#50391837)

      I don't know if that is Suskind's view. Some physicists certainly hold the view that you do not see inside the black hole and what an external observer thinks of as the interior is really the surface.

      That however is not the holographic principle. The holographic principle stats that there is an equivalence of certain 3 dimension gauges theories with four dimensional quantum gravity.

      • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
        If you have a 3-dimension region that is so full of information that that information cannot be encoded on a 2-d boundary of that region, then you have a black hole.
        • If you have a 3-dimension region that is so full of information that that information cannot be encoded on a 2-d boundary of that region, then you have a black hole

          Almost:

          If you have a three-dimensional region that is so full of information that it can entirely cover the surface when encoded at one bit per plank-length (diameter?) area, then the mass of the information is enough that its gravitation creates a black hole with exactly that much surface area to the event horizon.

          If you throw more information d

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "Hawking's new idea is that the information doesn't make it inside the black hole at all. Instead, it's permanently encoded in a 2D hologram at the surface of the black hole's event horizon".

      Uh, isn't that basically Susskind's idea? The holographic principal and all.

      No, it was his idea:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW-p8s_HCCo&feature=youtu.be&t=62 [youtube.com]

  • by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:02PM (#50391553) Homepage

    He doesn't look all too terribly excited about it.

    • He doesn't look all too terribly excited about it.

      Well, you try having ALS for five decades and be left paralyzed almost everywhere. You might not be smiling in every candid shot that's taken of you.

      • by MouseR ( 3264 )

        Just laugh about it.

        • I have no inclination to laugh at a person's disabilities, thankyouverymuch.

          • by MouseR ( 3264 )

            It appears he has a more open sense of humor you sport.

            He's been quite eager to participate in comedy when invited. Undoubtedly he's going through an excruciatingly debilitating ordeal, four decades longer than his doctor told him. So yes, he can
            Laugh.

            In the end the joke's on us because few understand what he's talking about. Entirely.

  • I look forward to the Lucas-style remake of Interstellar next year.

    • Han will shoot first because in extreme gravity conditions you can assume simultaneity does not exist?
  • Getting garbaje out of a black hole.
  • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:21PM (#50391651)

    Hawking in all his brilliance has produced a new paradox trying to solve another? How's that help anything? This is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

    So now we have information that's "useless" because we won't be able to unscramble it, but no information is lost? It's like saying that the information on my degaussed and melted down backup disk drive is *still* there, if I just knew how to reassemble it properly. That backup disk is just a pile of slag, the information it contained is gone. I'm sorry, that sure looks like we lost information to me... The net effect is the same as the information being lost, so I don't see how this stroke of genius helps the problem beyond moving the paradox to having the information preserved but unrecoverable by any possible means.

    Try again sir... You didn't solve anything here.

    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      i use the blackhole encryption method on all my data... what do you mean "The net effect is the same as the information being lost"

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:33PM (#50391747)

      I think the point is that the information is there, but it would require a tremendous amount of energy to reassemble it, much more than, say, putting humpty-dumpty back together again. That's not a paradox.

      I'm not a physicist, but the holographic principle has been around for a long time; it's conjectures that a black hole is a 2-dimensional object--there's no space on the other side of the event horizon, the event horizon _is_ the blackhole. And others have suggested that information can leak via fluctuations at the boundary. Any physicists care to distinguish what's truly novel with this new theory?

      • My point is that if the "information is there" but we cannot retrieve it, it's the *same* as information being destroyed. The paradox now becomes how you can have information existing in theory that you cannot obtain though any amount of effort. This makes this little thought experiment useless, as it cannot be proven by it's very definition. This kind of thing is not helpful scientific thinking.

        • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @07:37PM (#50392121)

          You're getting hung up on the word information. It's a term of art in this context. The physics is relying on an an equivalency between information content and energy. In many cases it's easier to model blackholes from an information-theoretic context. That is, bits go in, bits come out. It's like the word entropy--the same word is used to describe seemingly different phenomena regarding both information and energy, but really it's the same phenomenon.

          Just replace "information" with "energy" and it will make more sense. By information coming out, they mean energy is coming out. And energy, of course, is that thing which allows us to perform useful work.

          Why does this matter? Well remember that the laws of thermodynamics say that entropy is always increasing in a closed system. If blackholes sucked entropy out of the universe, the implications are problematic, for reasons I don't really understand, and that aren't resolved by simply stating the obvious--blackholes are part of the universe.

          Rather than calling this the "entropy" paradox, though, it's called the "information paradox". It's just easier to reason about it when you think in terms of bits.

          Also, your original assertion is incorrect. Imagine that we burn a tiny piece of paper with some secret information on it. Theoretically with enough cameras, recorders, and other equipment we could reconstitute the secret by tracking every scrap of carbon and every other molecule. But it requires tremendous resources. The resources needed scale as a high-order geometric function of the size (or complexity) of the thing we burned. If we thoroughly burnt a book, there wouldn't be enough resources on earth, perhaps the solar system, to build the machines needed to track and reconstitute the information.

          Because the universe is finite, and the information released by a blackhole so "scrambled", there's not enough energy in the entire universe to unscramble it. As large as the universe is, it's no match for math. But we _know_ the information is there because the energy emitted can be used to perform work.

          • Just a thought. If the idea makes more sense if named as "energy", then why the hell call her "information"? Physicists have freak out enough in their ideas, they do not need further worsen the situation by mixing disjointed terms.
        • by Bengie ( 1121981 )

          My point is that if the "information is there" but we cannot retrieve it, it's the *same* as information being destroyed

          I can do just this with only 256bits of entropy. It's called AES encryption. A future observer not being able to unscramble entropy back into its data form even with all of the energy in the Universe without knowing what the entropy was. This is not an issue. The real issue is the past version of the information not being able to be unscrambled when you run time backwards.

          One of the big things about our Universe is causality, it is the single most important concept. One of its big points is given a set o

      • AKA, Picard's Theorem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      • by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @07:51PM (#50392225)
        Being able to reassemble it is not the point, it's that you can re-wind time and get the information back out. With the normal idea of a blackhole, even if you could rewind time, you couldn't get the information back out.
        • Being able to reassemble it is not the point, it's that you can re-wind time and get the information back out. With the normal idea of a blackhole, even if you could rewind time, you couldn't get the information back out.

          No, you miss the point. He said basically "Having the information 'available' isn't really helpful because we have no way to get it." You simply proposed a theoretical way to get it that can't be done either at this time, possibly ever, so his assertion that we can't get it is still right. Unless you are a Q, telling us to "rewind time" as about as helpful as suggesting we simply change the gravitational constant of the universe.

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 )

            He said basically "Having the information 'available' isn't really helpful because we have no way to get it."

            This happens all the time, it's a normal part of the real world. You can't build a computer powerful enough to simulate the Universe, within the Universe. The information may be lost to observers within the Universe, but never lost to the Universe itself. "Us" being able to retrieve the information has no bearing on the subject. Simple example. Tell me exactly what happened 13.8bil years ago, I want to know the exact position of every bit of information in the Universe down to its plank. You may not be able

    • He's not trying to "solve" anything, dumbass. He's trying to figure out how the universe works.

      If information isn't *actually* destroyed by a black hole, that's something new about the universe that we didn't know. It's a new discovery.

      Not all science is about "solving" things. In fact, almost none of it is.

      • Ok, then he didn't "solve" anything, he just produced another theory which from the outside looks EXACTLY like other theories and always will if you apply his theory. He hasn't suggested anything novel or unique that advances the thought experiment in any appreciable way and has really just replaced one intractable problem for another. It's like he flipped the dime over and claimed it was a different coin because he could see a different design on it. Same coin, same problem, nothing has changed.

        I feel

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Ok, then he didn't "solve" anything, he just produced another theory which from the outside looks EXACTLY like other theories and always will if you apply his theory

          Uhh, maybe you see that because the whole point was that current theories can be made consistent handling things that way. The whole job of a theorist is to use theories to make predictions, looking for either potential inconsistencies with itself, other theories, or with known data. Finding out what was thought to be an inconsistency isn't is important.

          He hasn't suggested anything novel or unique that advances the thought experiment in any appreciable way and has really just replaced one intractable problem for another

          If you are unaware of and/or are struggling with the idea of physical information, how exactly are you able to determine the novelty and amount of advance

      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        We already knew information wasn't destroyed, we just didn't have a mechanism for it not to. If information could be destroyed, then causality wouldn't work. What do you thin would happen in a universe where cause-and-effect didn't occur? No science, that's what.
        • by Anonymous Coward

          We already knew information wasn't destroyed,

          We have strong reasons to think this, but that doesn't preclude a universe where information conservation is ultimately wrong. Lack of time symmetry doesn't prevent cause and effect or science from existing...

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            Other than breaking conservation of energy and cause and effect, yeah, all peachy. We may not know anything 100%, but all science ever has been based on these premises and we have no reason to think otherwise.

            Information is irretrievably lost
            Advantage: Seems to be a direct consequence of relatively non-controversial calculation based on semiclassical gravity.
            Disadvantage: Violates unitarity, as well as energy conservation or causality.

        • What do you thin would happen in a universe where cause-and-effect didn't occur?

          Donald Trump.

    • The summary said exactly the same thing you did, except much more succinctly. And people complain about Slashdot's editors??
    • This is what mathematicians would call a non-constructive proof, i.e. 'Im telling you this works but dont ask me how to get the result'
    • by Xyrus ( 755017 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @07:54AM (#50394383) Journal

      You don't understand the concept and made ASSumptions based on a generalized analogy that isn't even wholly correct, then proclaim that he's an idiot.

      Are you running for office?

      Regardless, how about a different analogy that might might make this more clear.

      You have an egg. You drop it. The egg hits the floor. It vanishes. Do you still have an egg? Nope.

      You have an egg. You drop it. The egg splatters on the floor. Do you still have an egg? Yep.

      The former is how black holes were thought to work. The problem is that if black holes really worked that way it would cause some rather odd things to occur. We haven't observed these really odd things, which implies that black holes don't operate that way.

      The latter is how they operate according to the new work. The egg may not be in the same form, but it didn't "vanish". You didn't "lose" anything. It's just in a different form. Sure, it may not be anything more than a mess on your floor. It may not be useful for anything other than a Fido snack. But it doesn't change the fact that the egg is still there.

      • I find interesting how your analogy of the egg is much more useful to the subject than the stupid thing to call "information" not caring about the context (thus making everyone think that the information would be something like a text message or a signal TV). Who had this stupid idea to call it "information"?
        • by Anonymous Coward

          The connection between thermodynamics and information theory goes back to at least von Neumann, although the some of the parallel principles existed back to 19th century.

      • No, it still vanishes, however an imprint of the egg persists on the floor (but in the short run invisible even in principle to anything not actually in or under the floor) such that it interferes with the thermal radiation the floor produces on a cold cold cold day in the far future. Careful examination of that thermal radiation will show the mass-energy-momentum of the egg reached the floor at some point in the past, but is insufficient to reconstruct the egg.

        (Additionally, there's the interesting point

    • Now he can name the effect after himself.
  • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:29PM (#50391713) Homepage

    A particle falling into a black hole never perceives itself as having moved past an event horizon, as an apparent event horizon recedes before it. The horizon keeps receding in the direction of the "singularity" until it's torn apart on the way in.

    An external observer never perceives a particle falling past the so-called "true" horizon; it perceives the falling object's time as slowing down to a virtual stop at the event horizon.

    Both of these views are logically consistent under a simple constraint: nothing ever passes an event horizon, and there's no such thing as a "true" horizon, only apparent horizons. The outside observer's view of "truth" should be given no more precedence as being reality than the infalling observer's perception.

    The same nothing-moves-past-the-event-horizon rule must apply to particles falling into the black hole as it's forming: they never get to reach a "singularity" either. Meaning nothing is ever in a singularity state, even that which formed the black hole itself.

    As a black hole evaporates, its mass drops and its event horizon moves inward. Hence, an outside observer will perceive more of an infalling particle's progress inward, as if time is slowly being released. The infalling particle perceives no wait, just a continuous fall. Since the outside observer is seeing the infalling particle's time as moving many, many orders of magnitude slower, then for the two reference frames to be logically consistent, the amount of black hole power output perceived by the outside observer must be perceived by the infalling particle to be many, many orders of magnitude more intense. Hence it's far from black to the infalling particle, rather an intense source of radiation, growing ever more violent as the particle falls further in.

    In short, all of this implies that black holes, to an outside observer, are basically a spot where time slows to a near stop, slowly leaking it out as they radiate away. To an infalling observer, he's just falling into a collapsing star that grows ever more radiatively intense as it collapses. The infalling particle, like everything else that falls into the black hole in the collapse, is blown apart by the intense radiation. But no special rules occur, no loss of information - and no singularity.

    Or whatever, what do I know ;)

    • by MouseR ( 3264 )

      So assuming was currently are falling towards an EH, looking out from out ever-slowing time, would we perceive the universe as inflating?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There is nothing past the event horizon. For every bit of information (energy, matter) that falls into a blackhole, the event horizon expands as-if the blackhole were a two-dimensional structure. In other words, the event horizon expands more than if there were three-dimensional space between the event horizon and the singularity.

      Image a balloon that you fill with water. For every drop of water you add, the surface of the balloon expands as if all the water droplets were compacted on the surface--nothing in

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I like this theory. It's clear, consistent with previous observations, and provides a clear explanation. But I don't understand one thing.... what happens when the Black hole expands?

      This great explanation you gave only works after the black hole is created, and is now slowly losing mass via Hawking radiation. What happens to an observer when they fall in and the radius of the event horizon increases to a point beyond where they got 'stuck' in the stopped time of the horizon?

      • I could be wrong, but they would never perceive such a state. There is no one horizon, but many different horizons depending on the observer.

    • by AthanasiusKircher ( 1333179 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @09:49PM (#50392713)

      A particle falling into a black hole never perceives itself as having moved past an event horizon, as an apparent event horizon recedes before it. The horizon keeps receding in the direction of the "singularity" until it's torn apart on the way in.

      This isn't true. Particles do in fact pass the event horizon in finite time (as judged in their own time frame). In fact, for very large black holes (tens of thousands of solar masses), it would easily be possible to pass the event horizon without experiencing tidal forces strong enough to rip you apart... in finite time.

      An external observer never perceives a particle falling past the so-called "true" horizon; it perceives the falling object's time as slowing down to a virtual stop at the event horizon.

      While this is sort of true, the idea of an external observing viewing an astronaut "frozen in time" just above the event horizon is just not true in any practical sense.

      What you'd actually observe if you watched someone fall into a black hole is the light from that person exponentially getting dimmer and fading out basically completely in finite time (i.e., probably within a fraction of a second for reasonable sized black holes). Yes, theoretically you can get a photon emitted and taking years or centuries to reach an external observer, but the amount of emitted light decays exponentially fairly quickly -- so as an external observer you'd actually see someone basically "disappear" at the event horizon in finite time (and fairly quickly actually). (For some details and a sample calculation with explanation, see here [ucr.edu].)

      Both of these views are logically consistent under a simple constraint: nothing ever passes an event horizon, and there's no such thing as a "true" horizon, only apparent horizons. The outside observer's view of "truth" should be given no more precedence as being reality than the infalling observer's perception.

      Well, since both of your "views" are sort of wrong (or, well, at least misleading), I'm not sure the rest of your explanation should be taken as true.

      Also, the problem is notions of simultaneity and where time and space is in black holes is quite complex when you try to compare observers in general relativity -- basically, you really can't come up with objective metrics that will satisfy notions of simultaneity for observers except in a local sense. So talking about whether a black hole "has formed" or where the event horizon "is" at a particular moment of time becomes quite complicated when you start to involve "external" observers. (For some details, see here [stackexchange.com] for a bit of an explanation.)

      Anyhow, there's lots of debate going on with Hawking about what exactly goes on with black holes (and information), but my point is that trying to apply simple intuition to general relativistic effects around black holes is pretty much destined to fail, or at least lead to a lot of misunderstandings.

      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        This isn't true. Particles do in fact pass the event horizon in finite time (as judged in their own time frame). In fact, for very large black holes (tens of thousands of solar masses), it would easily be possible to pass the event horizon without experiencing tidal forces strong enough to rip you apart... in finite time.

        Particles pass the so-called "true" horizon, as perceived by an outside observer, in their time. But they don't perceive it to be an event horizon. They instead perceive an "apparent horizo

        • BTW, I'm hardly the only one suggesting that there's no "true" event horizon, only apparent horizons - Hawking himself suggests that. Any argument you make declaring the "true" horizon to be absolute truth and the apparent horizon to just be an illusion isn't just going against me, it's going against Hawking.

          First, Hawking's idea here is far from widely accepted. Second, his use of "apparent horizons" is mostly to resolve the so-called "firewall" paradox. (You're probably aware of that, but it's hard to tell based on your posts.) It is NOT suggesting that event horizons "don't exist" or that someone falling into a black hole could never pass one -- it's more like they're "fuzzy" in a quantum mechanical way. Third, I'm really not sure what you're talking about as the "true" event horizon as observed by someo

          • As you point out later in your post, an event horizon is mostly a concept relevant to external observers, not someone falling into a black hole

            To reiterate what AC says, no, an event horizon is *especially* relevant to an infaller, because it's the boundary formed by the set of points surrounding a region of spacetime at which all null geodesics lead inside that boundary and ONLY inside that boundary (or outside it in the case of a cosmological event horizon).

            Hawking's argument about apparent black holes e

        • The black hole per se is not an emitter. Unruh radiation depends on the observer-dependent aspects of the horizon (any horizon; it's also true for the cosmological horizon) and is very dim and very similar to a very cold blackbody; while some observers will see it brighter and warmer than others, this is not true for any observer free-falling towards (and through) a horizon, because the Unruh radiation is also in free-fall You can reverse the picture and ask why a free-falling infaller does not get ioni

    • The experience of a classical infaller (or an observer of a classical infaller) is not really relevant in this story (but please see my final paragraph). Hawking is trying to deal with the AMPS (Polchinksi et al) firewall paradox, wherein an entangled (quantum) pair has one pair partner fly off towards infinity with the other remaining gravitationally bound to the compact dense object that has a horizon.

      AMPS strongly suggests that at least one of the following must be false: semiclassical gravity as a va

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @06:37PM (#50391767)

    ... optimizing queries for Oracle.

  • What's Minnesota fgo to do with this?

    • by osu-neko ( 2604 )
      It's just an example of some place you're unlikely to know the capital of. Common sense would have it in Minneapolis, so of course it's in some dinky nearby town instead...
      • Saint Paul is the second largest city in Minnesota, so not really dinky. Anyway, it's one continuous metro area, so it doesn't really matter.
        • by osu-neko ( 2604 )

          Anyway, it's one continuous metro area, so it doesn't really matter.

          That's what the people from St. Paul (and the other suburbs of Minneapolis) say... :p

      • In the US, the capital and the largest city tend to be different, unlike in Europe. Knowing only that Minneapolis is the largest city in Minnesota, your best guess would be "not Minneapolis".

  • Who cares if information is preserved in a black hole? What purpose does it serve? What can it teach us about the universe? I'd actually like to know the answers to these questions.

    But... Hawking is undoubtedly a brilliant mind. Why has he been wasting his time for years trying to decide whether or not "information is preserved in a black hole"?

    I'm admitting my ignorance here... Someone please explain to me what the relevance of this is...

    • Who cares if information is preserved in a black hole? What purpose does it serve? What can it teach us about the universe? I'd actually like to know the answers to these questions.

      But... Hawking is undoubtedly a brilliant mind. Why has he been wasting his time for years trying to decide whether or not "information is preserved in a black hole"?

      I'm admitting my ignorance here... Someone please explain to me what the relevance of this is...

      The problem is that we don't know what we don't know yet. This discovery will act as a stepping stone for other discoveries that we can't predict; some directly useful in every day life, others not so much. Scientific advancement is all build on the shoulders of those who came before; this discovery lifts us a little bit higher, ready to catch whatever comes next.

    • " Someone please explain to me what the relevance of this is..."

      That would take about 3 months and an understanding of what entropy is

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jheath314 ( 916607 )

      Will this be useful for solving real-world problems here and now? Probably not.

      Does it help us better understand the universe? Absolutely.

      The black hole information paradox is important in physics because a pretty fundamental idea of quantum mechanics is that it shouldn't be possible to destroy information. Burn a book? The complete information about all the molecules in the book are still encoded in the wave function of the system. Annihilate it with anti-matter? The information is now carried by the

      • by Pro923 ( 1447307 )

        I really do care a lot about science... I just don't fully understand why information that is caught in a gravity well is relevant in any way - whether or not it retains it's order. Your explanation helps though, thanks for that.

      • I'm probably being naive here, but are not putting complexity where it does not exist? If you have a book and dismantle it so far as to undo it in their atoms, I do not see how you would be able to preserve how the atoms were linked to form the book (you will have just a bunch of atoms from many elements). And why the atoms that make up the book would cease to exist if the book were swallowed by a black hole? The "book" (your atoms) would still be inside the black hole, rather than "cease to exist" he was n
    • Modern physics has evolved into a discipline in which we can treat the universe as an information processor. Everything depends on information. In fact, the speed of light is considered to be more of a speed limit on the propagation of information, not just light. According to our present understanding, there exist several places in the universe that seem to trap information, and it seems that information is lost. Loss of information like this raises many other questions of importance that I am totally unfi

    • Why are you on this website?

    • Here's my try:

      Theories of physics that seem to be mostly true predict that information (defined in a physically rigorously way, of course) can't actually be destroyed. Black holes appear to destroy information (in the older theories, the only characteristics of black holes were mass, spin, and charge). Something has to give there; either the theories are wrong or black holes don't destroy information. Hawking's proposing a hypothesis that says black holes don't destroy information, which would remove

  • I remember when Hawking said that basically black holes must radiate "information" somehow.

    Before that idea, the thinking was that if you could somehow reverse the direction of time, plenty of things in the universe would go in reverse but one thing that you would never see is something that went into a black hole coming back out again.

    Hawking felt that this was counterintuitive, or something, and came up with this idea: something goes into a black hole, and information about that thing comes out. Somehow.

    He never really described how that's supposed to happen. So, fast forward to today.

    So, basically he tacked one additional sentence onto an already pretty short statement -- IMHO.

    It's not all that exciting unless you're a really excitable theoretical physicist.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      So the gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that not even light can escape, how can information radiate out unless it is far faster than the speed of light? Any such thing? I'm not buying it.

  • Doesn't sound very informative to me

  • Can I be crass?

    Oh yeah, this is slashdot....

    My theory for getting information out of a black hole....

    Eat the barbacoa with spicy sauce at chipotle.

  • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @08:06PM (#50392297)

    Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia ...

    Millennials ask, "how would you burn Wikipedia?"

  • Do they mean Andrew Strominger at Harvard? I've never heard of Andrew Stromberg.

  • It's easy (Score:5, Funny)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @02:41AM (#50393449) Homepage

    Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole

    You rough it up a little, shine a bright light in its face and ask it where it stashed the loot. You could also play good astrophysicist/bad astrophysicist.

  • This guy is stuck in black hole related stuff and just can't move out of it.

    • by CxDoo ( 918501 )

      I don't know who's the moron downmoderating my posts days after being posted but I want to acknowledge their work. Keep it up!

  • Jim Stone, freelance journalist, points out that Stephen Hawking died years ago, "on schedule" (e.g., from the disease that he had). http://82.221.129.208/ac7index... [82.221.129.208] (search for "Hawking").

    Which raises the question, why are they perpetuating him? His voice has been used in many mainstream media projects in the past few years -- a Pink Floyd song, a Big Bang episode, some other song more recently, The Simpsons, etc. MSM is being used to perpetuate the lie, just as they're being used to perpetuate the l

    • by Prune ( 557140 )
      This is one of the rare cases where I wish there was a "+1 Troll" moderation option. Skilled in the art, indeed — you're one of a dying breed. As a form of sincere flattery I plagiarized your post to /sci/ on a well-known imageboard.
      • by Thing 1 ( 178996 )

        "Skilled in the art" -- thank you sir! I don't think that myself, I just receive inputs from disparate sources and attempt to put them together into something coherent and usable. Nobody has survived as long as Hawking has, with the disease that he has. So, as they say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." From wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

        The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, in 1963. At the time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years.[38][39]

        The avera

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