Stephen Hawking has expounded on his work with black holes and believes that he’s found and “escape route.” Granted that escape route will see you in another universe with no chance of getting back but it’s not the physical prison that others have suggested it is according to Dr. Hawking.
Source: Wikimedia Commons“A black hole has no hair”
Those were strange words once delivered by Princeton University’s theorist John Archibald Wheeler, but now it appears Dr. Hawkins disagrees. The lack of hair somehow meant that nothing could escape a black hole and has been a given in modern physics for around fifty years.
In a paper to be published this week in Physical Review Letters, Dr. Hawking along with Malcolm Perry of Cambridge University and Andrew Strominger of Harvard University believe that Wheeler may have had it wrong.
“They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought,” Dr. Hawking said in the voice we’ve come to expect from him. “If you feel you are trapped in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.”
Hawking didn’t mention how you may have come to find yourself in a black hole but no matter.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests that black holes are caused by too much matter in one place forcing a “tear” that would act like a mouth and swallow everything that neared it. Hawking added to this idea when he theorized that black holes are not permanent fixtures in their place in space but that ultimately they would begin to leak and ultimately explode.
Whether or not a black hole’s explosion would reveal more about itself remains an unanswered question.
Hawking maintains that the black hole wouldn’t reveal any information as it would have been erased. That, however, was refuted by many as they believe that time can theoretically turned back and consequently this “information” could be reconstructed.
The information paradox, as it is known, became an argument that still continues today.
Hawkings relented his position in this argument roughly a decade ago as it was viewed as shaking the foundations of physics too far and agreed that information is preserved rather than continue a fight that would end in the end of reality as we know it.
“It’s the past that tells us who we are. Without it we lose our identity,” he said in concession.
Now scientists, along with Hawking are suggesting that black holes may have hair
This simply depends on your vantage point. The fact that they were “bald” was the suggestion that properties are stripped from anything that enters a black hole.
“Null infinity is where light rays go if they are not trapped in a black hole,” Dr. Strominger recently said when in conversation with the New York Times. He then went on to explain that light rays on the surface of a black hole resemble straws stick out all over the place and trying to escape but held in place by the fearsome gravity of a black hole. But occasionally, incoming materials can move the straws, when particles fall in they move the straws in a process called supertranslation.
“One often hears that black holes have no hair,” Dr. Strominger and his colleague, Alexander Zhiboedov, wrote in 2014. “Black holes have a lush infinite head of supertranslation hair,” the two argued.
And this got Dr. Hawking excited and ultimately involved with the group that Strominger assembled moving from a secluded ranch in Texas to Hereford, Britain so Hawking could participate in the discussions.
“When I wrote my paper 40 years ago, I thought the information would pass into another universe,” Hawking said last month.
But Hawking pointed out that black holes will cough up their information albeit mixed around in a cosmic blender but “can be recovered in principle, but it is lost for all practical purposes.”
“The information will be re-emitted when the black hole evaporates. My work with my colleagues Andy Strominger of Harvard and Malcolm Perry of Cambridge has shown us the mechanism for information retrieval from a black hole.”
And that’s why Hawking believes that escape from a black hole could be possible.
It’s not nearly as much fun as when Hawking speaks of the blowhard Cheeto with something resembling hair framing his smug nonsense face that is Donald Trump who Hawking called a “demagogue” last month; it’s nice to see that Hawking is still exercising his brain in between appearances and voiceovers for the Big Bang Theory.
