-------No, Stephen Hawking Did Not Say Black Holes Dont Exist-------- Youve probably seen plenty of headlines proclaiming Stephen Hawking Says Black Holes Dont Exist, and heard people who read those headlines chattering excitedly about this seemingly huge shift in astrophysics. But as PopMech wisely points out, thats not an accurate summary of what Hawking actually said. All of this stems from a short paper Hawking submitted on January 22nd, titled Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes. And yes, the phrase there are no black holes appears in that paper. Hawking was not claiming that black holes don’t exist. Astronomers have been observing black holes for decades.The area thought to exist around a black hole from which nothing, not even light, can escape is called “event horizon.” Hawking said that instead of an event horizon, there is something else he calls an “apparent horizon.” In this apparent horizon, matter and energy is temporarily suspended, but then released. If this is true, it changes black holes as we know them. According to his proposal, black holes do trap information for a long time, but that information can, eventually, escape. Over the past 40 years, physicists have proposed multiple solutions, forcing the field to rethink black-hole behavior. In 1992, for example, Leonard Susskind, Larus Thorlacius and John Uglom proposed an idea known as “complementarity.” Then there’s the complicated “firewall paradox.” In 2012, Polchinski and his colleagues found a problem with the event horizon. As particles enter the event horizon, they’re ripped apart. As these particles break down, their research showed, they release a burst of energy, creating a firewall around the center of the black hole. This has become known as “the firewall paradox.” This notion of the event horizon as a highly energetic region throws another wrench in Einstein’s theory, which said that nothing special should happen at the event horizon. Hawking’s work has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it contains no equations, so there’s no way to test his new ideas. Because of that, he added, his statement about black holes can’t be considered a breakthrough in science yet. Hawking’s paper appeared online last week on an online server for research articles operated by Cornell University called arXiv. How can any of these paradoxes around black holes be answered? For now, the mathematical formulas to test and solve these new hypotheses simply aren’t there This annotated image labels several features in the simulation, including the event horizon of the black hole is in the picture
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 15:41:34 +0000