From Nature:
Some welcome his latest report as a fresh way to solve a black-hole conundrum; others are unsure of its merits.
…
In a paper published in 1976, Hawking pointed out that the outflowing particles — now known as Hawking radiation — would have completely random properties. As a result, once the black hole was gone, the information carried by anything that had previously fallen into the hole would be lost to the Universe. But this result clashes with laws of physics that say that information, like energy, is conserved, creating the paradox. “That paper was responsible for more sleepless nights among theoretical physicists than any paper in history,” Strominger said during his talk.
The mistake, Strominger explained, was to ignore the potential for the empty space to carry information. In their paper, he and Hawking, along with their third co-author Malcolm Perry, also at the University of Cambridge, turn to soft particles. These are low-energy versions of photons, hypothetical particles known as gravitons and other particles. Until recently, these were mainly used to make calculations in particle physics. But the authors note that the vacuum in which a black hole sits need not be devoid of particles — only energy — and therefore that soft particles are present there in a zero-energy state.
It follows, they write, that anything falling into a black hole would leave an imprint on these particles. “If you’re in one vacuum and you breathe on it — or do anything to it — you stir up a lot of soft gravitons,” said Strominger. After this disturbance, the vacuum around the black hole has changed, and the information has been preserved after all. More.
It’s pretty theoretical, including the “black hole hair.”
Hmmm. If it;s a hypothesis too far, … when a person like Stephen Hawking (or Richard Dawkins) achieves the status of “world’s smartest man” , they can say baffling or silly things and get away with it.
Peers just squirm helplessly. Whether in cosmology or evolution, the last thing the peers want is a serious inventory. So it’s better to just put up with this stuff for now.
Thoughts?
See also: Stephen Hawking should visit Efland
and
Stephen Hawking on the revised end of all things
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The problem is that it’s almost impossible to know in advance what ideas in science might turn out to be useful. That was the point of Carl Sagan’s parable of The Westminster Project in Demon-Haunted World. There are a lot of mysteries about this universe that look like they’re going to be very tough nuts to crack so science is going to need all the ideas it can get. It doesn’t matter how far out they might be, it doesn’t matter if most of them are wrong as long as long we get to the right one sooner or later But to get to the right one you have to generate new ideas to start with, which is what people like Stephen Hawking are doing.
However, Seversky, as the lamentable absence of a single discovery of any major paradigm-shift by a materialist attests, atheists are by definition forever condemned to conjecture from such entirely phantasmagorical assumptions, as would that of the multiverse, etc., been based upon.
No amount of funding by corporate hegemons of the current vassal, scientific zeitgeist will buy such primordial truths; vassal hirelings to those corporations and intellectual vassals of the theists and deists.
Name a major scientific breakthrough in the last 150 years that hasn’t been based on materialistic assumptions.
Seversky at 1, there is speculation, and then there is free-form speculation. There is coffee room speculation, and then there is stuff you’d say at a formal meeting.
Too much of this doesn’t feel ready for prime time.
Anyway, as has been pointed out before, the universe is shaped like a leprechaun’s hat, and that explains a lot more than people realize.
Seversky: Name a major scientific breakthrough in the last 150 years that hasn’t been based on materialistic assumptions.
Quantum Mechanics.
There has never been any scientific breakthrough that has been based on materialistic assumptions. I challenge anyone to name just one. And no, Darwinism was neither scientific nor a breakthrough.
Warning: whatever it is, I’ll shoot it down. LOL
Spot on, maps ! You wonder what Seve’s got between his ears with a challenge like that ! He’s sounding like a more proactively bellicose version of that Black Knight ; taking the fight to his mutilators….’Tis but a flesh wound, Sir.’ It’s that atheist’s heart and will ‘in locus cerebelli’ that gets them into endless trouble.
Axel, materialists are weak thinkers by nature.