My admiration for Stephen Hawking just keeps going up and up. Today, a headline says Hawking may have just unlocked one of science’s biggest mysteries.
Appearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on Tuesday, the acclaimed physicist presented his theory before a packed house of scientists.
Here is his discovery: When particles enter a black hole they leave traces of their information on the event horizon. When the particles leave, they carry some of that information back out. This phenomenon has been called “Hawking Radiation.”
I don’t want to puff myself up but I had a similar theory a long time ago. However, nobody took me seriously when I told them.
“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. “The event horizon is the sort of shell around a black hole, past which all matter will be drawn into the dense object’s powerful embrace.”
He continued: “The information is stored in a super translation of the horizon that the ingoing particles [from the source star] cause. The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. For all practical purposes the info is lost.”
Is there nothing this man can’t figure out?
I will be totally with him once I find out how all that music gets inside my transistor radio and comes back out again. Sometimes it feels like my brain is a black hole, where information goes in but can never get out again. It would not surprise me to learn that Hawking had something to do with that.
©2015 Jim Hagarty
