"I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics." With those words the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking opened a lecture at a scientific conference in Dublin on Wednesday which, in true Hawking style, overturned decades of scientific thinking, thrilled many of his academic peers and left everyone else scratching their heads.
Speaking to an audience of more than 600 physicists and dozens of the world's media, Hawking said he now believed that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything that is sucked into them. Instead, an abstract quantity called "information," which de-scribes the core characteristics of every type of particle, leaks from the black hole over time.
The announcement marks a U-turn from Hawking, who had argued that anything swallowed by a black hole was forever hidden from the outside universe. It has also lost him one of the most famous bets in science: in 1997 Hawking and physicist Kip Thorne made a wager with John Preskill at the California Institute of Technology, who insisted that information carried by an object entering a black hole was not destroyed.
PHOTO: EPA
"I'm now ready to concede the bet," Hawking said. An encyclopedia was to be chosen by the winner.
"John is all-American, so naturally he wants an encyclopedia of baseball. I had great difficulty finding one over here, so I offered him an encyclopedia of cricket as an alternative," Hawking said. "But John wouldn't be persuaded of the superiority of cricket."
The about-turn ends a 30-year personal struggle for Hawking. In 1974, while formulating new equations in an attempt to unite the heavyweight ideas of quantum mechanics and general relativity, he realized that black holes must emit heat, now known as Hawking radiation. The problem was that this radiation would carry energy away, meaning the black hole would gradually evaporate and then disappear in a final explosive outburst -- taking the crucial information with it. This contradicts the fundamental laws of quantum physics, which insist the information can never be fully wiped out.
While several physicists over the years offered solutions to this paradox, Hawking believed that the intense gravity inside a black hole somehow unravelled the quantum laws. More intriguingly, he suggested that the vanishing information might travel through the black hole to a parallel universe -- planting the seeds for a staple of science fiction.
"There is no baby universe branching off as I once thought," Hawking admitted. "I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like."
His calculations suggest the surface of the black hole, the event horizon, has fluctuations that let the information escape.
"It is great to solve a problem that has been troubling me for nearly 30 years, even though the answer is less exciting than the alternative I suggested," he said.
An American scientist convicted of lying to US authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen, China, to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain. Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and restoring movement in paralyzed people. It also has potential military applications: Scientists at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting
Indonesian police have arrested 13 people after shocking images of alleged abuse against small children at a daycare center went viral, sparking outrage across the nation, officials said on Monday. Police on Friday last week raided Little Aresha, a daycare center in Yogyakarta on Java island, following a report from a former employee. CCTV footage circulating on social media showed children, most younger than two, lying on the floor wearing only diapers, their hands and feet bound with rags. The police have confirmed that the footage is authentic. Police said they also found 20 children crammed into a room just 3m by 3m. “So
A highway bomb attack in a restive region of southwestern Colombia on Saturday killed 14 people and injured at least 38, the latest spate of violence ahead of next month’s presidential election. Authorities blamed the attack in the Cauca department — a conflict-ridden, coca-growing region — on dissidents of the now-disbanded FARC guerrilla army, who have been sowing violence across the country. “Those who carried out this attack ... are terrorists, fascists and drug traffickers,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on social media. “I want our very best soldiers to confront them,” he added. The leftist leader blamed the bombing
From post offices and parks to stations and even the summit of Mount Fuji, Japan’s vending machines are ubiquitous, but with the rapid pace of inflation cooling demand for their drinks, operators are being forced to rethink the business. Last month beverage giant DyDo Group Holdings announced it would remove about 20,000 vending machines — about 7 percent of their stock nationwide — by January next year, to “reconstruct a profitable network.” Pokka Sapporo Food & Beverage, based in Nagoya, also said last month it would sell its 40,000-machine operation to Osaka-based Lifedrink Co. “The strength of the vending machine
RSS