New article: Commentary on Hawking’s No Black Holes

  • Post author:
  • Post category:Physics

What was Stephen Hawking talking about when he said there are no black holes? Here’s an explanation for the non-scientist.

Click the icon below for a PDF version of the article. Right-click and Save-As to save a copy.

Click for Commentary on Hawking's No Black Holes
PDF version

Abstract:

In 2013, the media picked up a technical presentation by Stephen Hawking in which he stated that “There are no black holes.”  That’s a curious viewpoint from someone who spent much of his career working out the physics of black holes. Unfortunately, the rest of Hawking’s presentation was too technical for the media to touch, leaving the general public in need of new mental images to replace all those missing black holes. This paper is an informal discussion of the technical parts of Hawking’s paper without undue jargon and math.

 

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Justin Cooper

    I really enjoyed this abstract. I’d like to hear your interpretation of the latest Stephan Hawking buzz. I’m a mechanical engineer doing CFD related stuff, but also really enjoy learning about the heavier side of physics.

    1. Dave

      Thanks so much for the feedback. Last week Hawking indicated he has a solution to the information paradox, and promised that a technical paper is forthcoming. It has something to do with “supertranslations,” which somehow allows the holographically-smeared matter and energy at the event horizon to affect the particles evaporating from the black hole. (The concept of supertranslation is given by Hawking’s collaborator last year in http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5745 .) But until he publishes details, we don’t know if Hawking has radical new insights to offer, or just refinements to existing complementarity models. There’s some interesting discussion at http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2015/08/hawking-proposes-new-idea-for-how.html .

Comments are closed.