Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes’

Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes‘ – Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has declared that black holes do not exist – at least not in the way we normally think about them.

In a new paper, he tackles a scientific paradox regarding a black hole’s event horizon. This is the threshold past which nothing can escape it’s gravitational pull. Under Einstein’s theory of relativity, a hypothetical astronaut floating across an event horizon would be blissfully unaware unless he tried to turn around and float the other way.

The laws of quantum mechanics suggest that the event horizon would be a seething band of energy, or firewall, that would incinerate the astronaut. In his latest findings, Hawkins proposes that black holes don’t have a sharply delineated event horizon, but rather an “apparent horizon” – a much less fiery region where matter and energy are turned into a confusing mess that can re-emerge as radiation.

Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes’

Hawking writes that this would mean that “there are no black holes, in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape.” His new thery states that radiation emerging from a black hole would possess, in radically different form, all the original information from whatever fell into it. In turn, preserving a key principle of quantum physics: that information can never be removed from the universe.