Acclaimed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking declared black holes do not exist in the way the science community currently understands, in a study published Jan. 22.
Black holes are dense regions in space that light and matter cannot escape from, explained Peter Watson, Carleton physics professor.
He said in Hawking’s new study he is proposing matter and light in a black hole may not be gone forever.
“There are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity,” Hawking wrote. The idea of black holes should be “redefined.”
That’s a bold statement, Watson said.
“If that paper had come from anyone but Stephen Hawking no one would have read it,” he said.
The “classic view” of black holes, the one currently understood by the science community, was developed in the early 1900s by a German astrophysicist named Karl Schwarzchild, Watson said.
Hawking’s research in the 1970s added onto this theory and again his recent study slightly changes our interpretation of this view.
Watson explains the development using an analogy.
“You drop a paper into a black hole and the old theory of a black hole would say that information is now gone forever,” he said.
“Then people in the 1970s started thinking that information is in the black hole you just can’t get it out. The info exists, you just don’t have access to it,” he said.
Now, “Stephen Hawking is saying you could get that information back out,” he said.
Watson said Hawking’s study is not disproving the existence of black holes but rather “fixing up the technical issues.”
Watson said the science community needs to see black holes in more detail.
“We don’t have a really good theory of them yet and what [Hawking’s] doing may be going somewhere towards that theory,” he said.
