Science
Related: About this forumStephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'
Notion of an 'event horizon', from which nothing can escape, is incompatible with quantum theory, physicist claims.
Zeeya Merali
Most physicists foolhardy enough to write a paper claiming that there are no black holes at least not in the sense we usually imagine would probably be dismissed as cranks. But when the call to redefine these cosmic crunchers comes from Stephen Hawking, its worth taking notice. In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.
In its stead, Hawkings radical proposal is a much more benign apparent horizon, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.
There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory, Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, enables energy and information to escape from a black hole. A full explanation of the process, the physicist admits, would require a theory that successfully merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But that is a goal that has eluded physicists for nearly a century. The correct treatment, Hawking says, remains a mystery.
Hawking posted his paper on the arXiv preprint server on 22 January1. He titled it, whimsically, 'Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes', and it has yet to pass peer review. The paper was based on a talk he gave via Skype at a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013 (watch video of the talk).
more
http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583
MADem
(135,425 posts)I would tend to believe the guy, though, if he said so....!
tridim
(45,358 posts)They are all the same nothing, zero.
Lefty Thinker
(96 posts)I loved studying them in my college mathematics courses. It was interesting learning to integrate around a singularity in the complex plane. I would, however, disagree about them all being equal -- there are an engine variety of shapes to singularities, especially in complex or quaternary functions.
struggle4progress
(118,281 posts)in the Mercator projection of the earth surface, the poles are singularities
deutsey
(20,166 posts)about an astronaut in the future who enters a black hole and is assumed dead. He later emerges in what the article here calls "a more garbled form" and becomes a kind of messiah figure (reluctantly).
progressoid
(49,988 posts)n2doc
(47,953 posts)Get 2 preachers in a room and given them 5 minutes. They will be arguing.
Warpy
(111,254 posts)and observation I'm not sure we're capable of doing now in order to find out if what's falling in to the even horizon has any relationship to what is coming out in the jets.
They already know that the size of the event horizon/black hole has a set proportion to the amount of matter in a galaxy.
Other than that, all we know is that we don't know.