Famous astrophysicist finally accepts science of black holes
it's going to be termed as the most famous about-turn in the history of science. Stephen Hawking, who is regarded as the modern-day Albert Einstein, has recently accepted that black holes do not destroy everything they consume. Instead, they eventually emit out matter and energy in a mangled form, he informed the 17th international conference on General Relativity and Gravitation held at Ireland on July 21, 2004. Hawking's turn-about, the reasons for which are still unknown, settles a 30-year-old paradox involving the massive vortexes.
Black holes are formed at the end of the stars' life. The gravitational force of these black holes is so strong that even light cannot escape from them. In the 1970s, Hawking stated that these mysterious objects also have a temperature, which means they give off thermal radiation. Because of this radiation, all the mass of a hole ultimately gets converted into energy, leading to its destruction. With a black hole disappearing, the information enveloped inside it is also lost, hypothesised Hawking.
This theory however created a flutter in the scientific world, as it contradicted the laws of quantum physics, which state that information can never be completely wiped out. The wheelchair-bound mathematics professor of uk's Cambridge University has now accepted this. "As a black hole disintegrates, it sends its transformed content back into the infinite universal horizons from whence they came," Hawking told a packed hall using a speech synthesiser connected to a computer.
Hawking also dismissed another of his premise he had used for explaining the 'missing information' -- presence of a different 'baby' universe. "I am 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, but in an unrecognisable state."
The turn-about of the mastermind indeed is a victory for science as well as John Preskill -- in 1997, Hawking had betted with Caltech's astrophysicist Preskill, who insisted that information could not be lost in a black hole. At the conference, Hawking presented Preskill with a reference book 'Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia', after having it flown from the us.
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