Redaction from Hawking

"Stephen Hawking says there is no such thing as black holes, Einstein spinning in his grave"

STEPHEN Hawking has rocked the world of physics by reversing his lifetime’s work to claim that black holes do NOT exist – insisting they’re more like 50 shades of grey.

by

Gareth Morgan

January 24th, 2014

EXPRESS

The wheelchair-bound genius has posted a paper online that demolishes modern black hole theory. He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed.

It is considered one of the pillars of physics that the incredible gravitational pull created by the collapse of a star will be so strong that nothing can break free...much of this is thanks to Hawking’s own work.

But Hawking smashes this idea by saying that rather than there being an inescapable event horizon, we should think of a far less total “apparent horizon”. And, at a stroke, he has contradicted Albert Einstein.

He sets out his argument in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes, which is likely to send his fellow scientists into a spin.

Hawking writes: “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.”

He suggests that light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a treadmill and that they can slowly shrink by spewing out radiation.

Hawking told leading science magazine Nature: “There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory. [But quantum theory] enables energy and information to escape from a black hole”.

The professor’s grey hole theory would allow matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space.

The physicist admits that his idea requires a new theory that merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. But he added: “The correct treatment remains a mystery.”

Hawking’s latest work was prompted by a talk he gave via Skype to a meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, in August 2013.

He is attempting to solve what is known as the black-hole firewall paradox, which has puzzled scientists for almost two years. It stems from a “thought experiment” where scientists tried to imagine what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole.

Event horizons are mathematically simple consequences of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Black hole expert Don Page, of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, admits: “The picture Hawking gives sounds reasonable.”

But theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute is sceptical and insists: “In Einstein’s gravity, the black-hole horizon is not so different from any other part of space. We never see space-time fluctuate in our own neighbourhood: it is just too rare on large scales.”

Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former student of Hawking's, admits many physicists will find Hawking’s work “abhorrent”.

He says: “The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls. But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."