PMT 2014-14b by Huffington Post

When Stephen Hawking contradicts his own theory, that’s a paradox worth noting.

Like the black holes he described 40 years ago, the British cosmologist’s reassessment last week of the concept of “event horizons” is pulling in chatter from astrophysicists around the world.

It turns out that the black holes Hawking wrote about in 1974 — those places in the space-time continuum that can devour galaxies and even trap light forever — may not exist in the way that he proposed decades ago.

In a new online paper titled Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, the 72-year-old Hawking says, “There are no black holes — in the sense from which light can’t escape to infinity.”

The U-turn from Hawking, one of the pioneers of modern black hole theory, surprised his colleagues, said Amanda Peet, a theoretical physicist and associate professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in black hole paradoxes and string theory.

‘Radical departure’

“It’s majorly provocative. It’s saying there’s no ‘black’ in black hole. He’s sort of saying the hole is grey instead, not just absorbing everything.” she said. “It’s a very radical departure from past ideas.”

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Tagged: black hole, Stephen Hawking