The leading physicist Stephen Hawking has a new theory information in black holes. Hawking explained the concept during a lecture he gave for the Hawking Radiation Conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
THE EVENT HORIZON
“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,” Hawking said.
As Andrew Tarantola of Engadget explained, the event horizon is the edge of a black hole. The main component of Hawking’s new idea is that particles’ information would dwell on the event horizon as two-dimensional holograms, the information of which would leave the black hole as Hawking radiation does.
STEPHEN HAWKING: THE INFORMATION IS EFFECTIVELY LOST
However, the information leaving the black hole does not resemble its pre-hole form, effectively losing it in the hole. “The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form,” the physicist said. “This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost.”
At the conference, Stephen Hawking also suggested that everything that enters the black hole influences the Hawking radiation.
THE BLACK HOLE INFORMATION PARADOX
The dilemma of information leaving black holes is what physicists call the black hole information paradox. According to quantum mechanics, physical information never disappears; in general relativity, the same doesn’t principle does not hold up.
VIEW OF OTHER PHYSICISTS
As Gautam Naik reported for The Wall Street Journal, Hawking is not the first major physicist to postulate that information can leave black holes. Utrecht University’s Gerald ‘t Hooft published a slightly different version of it in 1996, in which he claimed that Hawking radiation brings information out with it as it exits the black hole. Dr. ‘t Hooft has since distanced himself from his study, “because I made some assumptions and my calculations showed that I get too much information” that leaves the black hole.
Another physicist that spoke to Naik disputed Stephen Hawking’s claim that the information paradox had been resolved. Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at a French university attending the conference, said “I wouldn’t say the solution to the information paradox has been found because there are several competing ideas.”
