BBC Horizon 2005: 4/7 The Hawking Paradox

Although Hawking's theories about black hole evaporation were revolutionary, they soon came to be widely accepted. But Hawking felt that this work had far more fundamental consequences.

In 1976 he published a paper in Physical Review D called, "The breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse". In this paper, Hawking argued that it wasn't just the black hole that disappeared.

He said that all the information about everything that had ever been inside the black hole disappeared, too.


The understanding of black has accelerated in recent years
In everyday life, we're used to losing information - but according to physics this isn't supposed to happen; according to physics, information is never really lost, it just gets harder to find.

The reason physicists cling on to the idea that information can't be lost is that it's their link with either the past or the future. If information is lost then science can never know the past or predict the future. There are limits to what science can know.

For many years, no one took much notice of Hawking's ideas until a fateful meeting in San Francisco.

Hawking presented his ideas to some of the world's leading physicists, and in the audience were two particle physicists, Gerard t'Hooft and Leonard Susskind.

They were shocked. They both grasped that Hawking's "breakdown of predictability" applied not only to black holes but to all processes in physics.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• black holes
• universe
• string theory
• physics
• big bang
• astronomy
• Stephen Hawking

[MathPhysChemSkyNerd]

@159tony I got it!

[159tony]

if you understood everything about this documentary then you are good at physics like myself