Stephen Hawking revealed his latest idea about where he believes lost information wind up after being sucked into a black hole — in alternative universes. Photo: Adam af Ekenstam
“If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out,” said Stephen Hawking tonight in a public lecture in Stockholm while revealing his latest idea that black holes offer a possible passage to another universe.
The legendary scientist and author said tonight that he has discovered a mechanism “by which information is returned out of the black hole.”
The conference, which was organized by UNC physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton, is dedicated to finding a solution to one of science’s notoriously difficult questions: what happens to the information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes? Is it retrievable? The laws of quantum mechanics demand that it should be; but that presents a problem, or paradox, for our current understanding of black holes.
Hawking said he has been working on supertranslations with Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger, and that his findings suggest the possibility that missing information could be stored in alternate universes.
“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Hawking said. “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.
“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”
He’ll expand on this tomorrow during the conference at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Video clip:Stephen Hawking is escorted by KTH President Peter Gudmundson as he arrives for the first day of the Hawking Radiation Conference, being held on the KTH campus this week.
Stephen Hawking will present what he describes as “a new idea” concerning black holes tomorrow, at a special conference on Hawking radiation that is being held at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
On his Facebook feed yesterday, Hawking said: “I am delighted to be in Stockholm, Sweden, the home of the Nobel Prize, to discuss Hawking radiation – the discovery that black holes emit radiation, and the Information Paradox – a 40 year puzzle about how information is conserved in a black hole. I have a new idea which I am excited to share and debate with my colleagues.”
Hawking arrived in Stockholm over the weekend and saw a performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte in the 18th century royal theatre at Ulricsdahl, in southern Stockholm. He will stay in town until the conclusion of the conference on Saturday.
The room is prepared for Stephen Hawking and other leading physicists, who come to KTH Royal Institute of Technology’s campus on Monday to solve one of science’s most mind-bending questions: whether singularities in black holes exist, and what bearing does Hawking Radiation have on them. (Photo: David Callahan)
What would happen to you if you were sucked into a black hole? Would you disappear without a trace?
Physicists have argued for years that these bottomless pits of space-time gobble up anything that gets too close to their gravitational field, seal it away for good, and then eventually evaporate, leaving no trace of what was once inside. The problem is, that scenario violates one very important principle of quantum physics: that the information about the physical state of anything in the universe must be retrievable, no matter what happened to it. It’s called the “information loss paradox”, and it’s the hot question on the table when Stephen Hawking comes to KTH Royal Institute of Technology on Monday to kick off a week of debate and discussions with leading physicists.
Hosted by the research institute, Nordita (which is driven by KTH and Stockholm University), the Hawking Radiation Conference sounds a little like a “lock them in a room and don’t let them out until they come up with something” scenario.
“The purpose is to bring together the people who have studied Hawking since the 1970s, and put them in one room and try to solve this question,” says conference organizer Laua Mersini-Houghton, a theoretical physicist from University of North Carolina. “When I had the idea for this conference, I called Professor Hawking. He immediately said yes and he set the date.”
The list of conference participants reads like a who’s who of modern physics history, featuring such prominent names as Leonard Parker, Gerard ‘t Hooft and Jim Bardeen. But if you had your hopes set on dropping in for a listen, alas, I’m afraid this cosmic gathering is closed to the public.
But I’ll be reporting regularly from the conference, so stay tuned to this blog for the latest.
Jim Hartle, University of California, Santa Barbara
Gerard t’Hooft, Utrecht University
Gary Horowitz, University of California, Santa Barbara
Werner Israel, University of Victoria
Claus Kiefer, University of Cologne
Jorma Louko, University of Nottingham
Charles Misner, University of Maryland
Emil Mottola, Florida Atlantic University
Jack Ng, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Jerome Novak, French National Centre for Science
Don Page, University of Alberta
Leonard Parker, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Joe Polchinski, University of California, Santa Barbara
Carlo Rovelli, Aix-Marseille University
Philippe Spindel, University of Mons
Kelly Stelle, Imperial College London
Andy Strominger, Harvard University
Bo Sundborg, Stockholm University
Paulo Vargas Moniz, Universidade da Beira Interior
Francesca Vidotto, Radboud University Nijmegen
Bob Wald, University of Chicago
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We just finished this Google Hangout from Greenland with Jari Krützfeldt, a student at the Centre for Naval Architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Watch the video on Youtube to find out more about the project he’s working on in the Arctic Ocean, which will help get accurate data about the currents that are believed to be melting the sea ice at the North and South Poles.
The Swedish Icebreaker, Oden, will take Krützfeldt and other scientists into the Arctic Ocean this summer. (Photo: Larry Larsson, U.S. Navy Photo – http://www.navy.mil; exact source – [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
While the rest of Europe broils in the summer heat, one student from Sweden will be chilling out — literally.
Jari Krützfeldt, a student at the Centre for Naval Architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, will sail aboard the Swedish icebreaker, Oden, which is bound for the icy waters at the mouth of the Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. His mission is to drop 10 deep-water probes to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, barely 1,100 km from the North Pole.
Krützfeldt is part of a team that is developing and testing cost-effective, autonomous systems for long-term measurements of conditions at the seabed, mainly in polar regions. The probes he is bringing to the Arctic are designed to endure five years at a depth of 1,000m after deployment. (The other members of the Bottom Lander for Long Term Underwater Sensing (LoTUS) are Krützfeldt’s instructor, Jakob Kuttenkeuler, and Anna Wåhlin and Nina Kirchner.)
Each probe will await its pre-programmed moment to surface and deliver data to the lab at KTH. (Image: Centre for Naval Architecture at KTH)
After Krützfeldt lowers them into the water, the bottom landers will likely never been seen again; but they will be heard from.
Each probe will rest at the bottom of the ocean, collecting water temperature data that will help to improve prediction models for future sea level rising, he says.
Greenland’s glaciers, including the Petermann Glacier, are believed to be melting due to the flow of warm, salty deep ocean currents into the Greenland fjords.
“We want to test the landers under realistic conditions and investigate these deep ocean currents,” Krützfeldt says.
Jari Krützfeldt, a student at the Centre for Naval Architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in the assembly room for the bottom landers. (Photo: David Callahan)
“There is uncertainty about the rate at which the glacier is melting, and this project will provide a way to collect the data needed to predict the process,” he says. “And it does it at a low cost. The project needed probes with cheap moorings that no one had to come back for to collect.”
The bottom landers are programmed to rise toward the ocean’s surface, one by one, at different times over the next year. When each one reaches the surface, it then transmits its data via satellite to a lab at KTH.
The idea is to get a time-lapse picture of the changes in water temperature that may be caused by the deep ocean currents of warmer, salty water.
Once at the surface, the probes will drift with the current, sending out their positions regularly and collecting data about surface current direction and velocity.
In my next blog post, we’ll catch up with Krützfeldt and see how the mission is going, plus share some images and video from the expedition. But first, on July 28, join us for a Google Hang, where he will take your questions about the system and its deployment in the Arctic, as well as anything else you wonder about a polar expedition.
Here’s the link to the live Google Hangout on Air broadcast …
Here’s a short video of our conversation in the lab at KTH Center for Naval Architecture in Stockholm, where Krützfeldt was preparing the probes for deployment recently.
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