Black Hole Hawking radiation not random - information can be retrieved?

[papau]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=753&e=1&u=/ap/20040716/ap_on_sc/britain_black_holes

Hawking Changes His Mind on Black Holes

By JANE WARDELL, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - After almost 30 years of arguing that a black hole swallows up everything that falls into it, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking backpedaled Thursday. In doing so, he lost one of the most famous bets in recent scientific history.

The world-famous author of a "Brief History of Time" said he and other scientists had gotten it wrong — the galactic traps may in fact allow information to escape. <snip>

"A black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell inside. So we can be sure of the past and predict the future."

The findings, which Hawking is due to present at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, on July 21, could help solve the "black hole information paradox," which is a crucial puzzle of modern physics. <snip>

[Birthmark]

1. Good timing.

I was just over at the Nature website reading the same thing. I'll be following this closely, though I probably won't understand a lot of it. :)

[papau]

2. QM lives off of defining a value for a division by zero - but it does

predict well.

I did my thesis on information theory - so I am quite curious about how he developed math that implies information retrival is possible from something that was defined as random.

And if the information is a probability field shape, as I suspect, what the hell does that tell us. I live in a world where you put data in, and if you can get it back out in a new location you have moved "information". But he will not be the first to see shapes and patterns in chaos

I hope this is better than his last piece of thought - that no God was needed to explain creation because the math problems and physical law problems do not matter since if the values were not what they are we would not be here observing those values and constraints. After being laughed at - but also after others picked up the idea and a few books were written - he seems to have backed off - at least in public.

I look forward to reading the presentation!

:-)

[stellanoir]

3. in my own personal idiocy. . .

I've always assumed that Black Holes were the back sides of Supernovas. . .silly me