HAWKING: Black Holes Have Bandwidth!

hawkingThanks to a reader for passing along this story.

As Albert Einstein once remarked in critiquing quantum mechanics, “God does not play dice with the universe.” But while God may not gamble in physics, Stephen Hawking definitely does. In fact, he’s just lost a bet. (Such bets are common among astrophysicists, who are inveterate gamblers.)

What was the bet?

Hawking bet John Preskill of Caltech that black holes are total information traps, that they don’t let any information out about what has fallen into them, that they have zero bandwidth.

This conclusion led to what is known as the “black hole information paradox.”

Well, it turns out that Hawking has now concluded he was wrong. Black holes do release information as the evaporate (you did know they evaporate, right? 😉 and, theoretically, one could recover that information.

Hawking is now scheduled to eat a plate of spaghettified crow at a physics conference in Dublin.

He also now has to pay up on the bet he made with Preskill. According to the story,

The forfeit is an encyclopedia, from which Preskill can recover information at will.

For more information on what Hawking may announce at the conference, see this story reporting a possible solution to the black hole information paradox that posits that black holes are actually cosmic fuzzballs made of subatomic string.

Ain’t science cool?

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

2 thoughts on “HAWKING: Black Holes Have Bandwidth!”

  1. Black holes can evaporate? Cool!!!
    Now, on to the important question: Did the devil make black holes, or is it just God having a good time.
    I hope that heaven includes a grand tour of the cosmos and a lengthy explanation about the nature of black holes.

  2. Hmmm. I use to own Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” in which there was more information about this subject, but my brother borrowed it and evidently lost it into a black hole.
    Good to know I have a shot at recovering it.

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