Black holes are a passage to another universe, says Stephen Hawking

“He is saying that the information is there twice already from the very beginning, so it’s never destroyed in the black hole to begin with”, Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm told New Scientist.

After all, according to the general theory of relativity, some scientists argue that physical information gobbled up by a black hole is lost forever.

“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect but on its boundary, the event horizon”, Hawking says in a video of his announcement, which can be viewed above. They are cosmic vacuums of bad, unthinkable power… and there’s about 100 million of them in our galaxy alone, including an enormous one at the center that’s billions of times bigger than the Sunday.

“The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles”, he said. The event horizon is the sort of shell around a black hole, past which all matter will be drawn into the dense object’s powerful embrace.

So how does that help something escape from the black hole?

He was at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, which is hosting the Hawking Radiation Conference dedicated to examining the mystery of the “information paradox” – a conundrum concerning what happens to things swallowed by black holes.

The event horizon is the rim around a black hole that acts as the point of no return – if you drift past the event horizon then you can’t ever escape the black hole’s grip. “The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form”, Hawking said.

His new idea, which he worked on with Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger, is one method by which that process could occur.

“How to get around this so-called information paradox?” It will take more discussion – and much comparing of math equations – to establish what’s new about Hawking’s theories in relation to t’Hooft’s, and whether Hawking has overcome some of the issues associated with earlier iterations of the idea. It’s even possible information could get out into parallel universes, he told the audience yesterday. “But you couldn’t come back to our universe”, Hawking said in a written press release.

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted”, he added. These things can not be lost, according to the way we think the universe works, and physicists generally believe that they aren’t really lost.

This book was written for anyone with an interest in black holes and the expansion of the universe, using easy-to-understand language that doesn’t require years of previous study to understand.