Black Hole Paradox Possibly Solved
(From the May/June 2004 issue of StarDate magazine)
Ohio State University physicists say they have settled a famous 1997 bet among fellow physicists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, and John Preskill by solving the so-called black hole information paradox.
A black hole is an object with such great gravitational pull that infalling matter and energy cannot escape. The information paradox asks whether all information going into a black hole is destroyed, or still exists inside the black hole. Preskill, a Caltech physicist, believed that the information survived; Cambridge University's Hawking and Caltech's Thorne disagreed. The stakes were a set of encyclopedias.
The Ohio State team was led by Samir Mathur. They proposed a solution using string theory, which holds that at the most basic level, all particles in the universe are made of tiny vibrating strings. The equations Mathur derived strongly suggest that the information continues to exist -- bound up in a giant tangle of strings that fills a black hole from its core to its surface. Instead of being smooth and featureless, the researchers say black holes are "stringy fuzzballs." Mathur's findings appeared in the March 1 issue of the journal Nuclear Physics B. RJ
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