From New Scientist:
Stephen Hawking says he has a way to escape from a black hole
What you may not know is that physicists have been arguing for 40 years about what happens to the information about the physical state of those objects once they fall in. Quantum mechanics says that this information cannot be destroyed, but general relativity says it must be – that’s why this argument is known as the information paradox.
Now Hawking says this information never makes it inside the black hole in the first place. “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” he said today.
The event horizon is the sphere around a black hole from inside which nothing can escape its clutches. Hawking is suggesting that the information about particles passing through is translated into a kind of hologram – a 2D description of a 3D object – that sits on the surface of the event horizon. “The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,” he said. “Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.” More.
Never mind the next universe, just think of all the phone numbers and dates and the name of that kid we went to high school with—information we thought was lost for good that could well be floating around those event horizons…
See also: Dr. Hawking, your black hole is ready now (The way some people talk about other universes, you would think they were another neighbourhood. We’ve never established that there are other universes.)
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