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Headline Tag: Science Rating: Amazing Hits: 726 Comments: 8 BBC Horizon: The Hawking Paradox BBC Horizon: The Hawking Paradox 2005 documentary, RT 49:17. Stephen Hawking is the most famous scientist on the planet. His popular science book 'A Brief History of Time' was a publishing sensation, staying at the top of the bestseller lists longer than any other book in recent history. But behind the public face lies an argument that has been raging for almost 30 years. Science had long predicted that if a sufficiently large star collapsed at the end of its life, all the matter left in the star would be crushed into an infinitely small point with infinite gravity and infinite density – a singularity. Hawking realised that the Universe was, in effect, a black hole in reverse. Hawking and his fellow physicists embarked on an extraordinary intellectual expedition – to tame the black hole. The period from the early 70s to the early 80s became known as the golden age of black hole research. Slowly physicists were coming to understand this most destructive force of nature. But Hawking realised that there was something missing from the emerging picture. All work on black holes to that point used the physics of the large-scale Universe, the physics of gravity first developed by Newton and then refined by Einstein's theories of general and special relativity. Hawking realised that to come to a full understanding of black holes, physicists would also have to use the physics of the small-scale Universe; the physics that had been developed to explain the movements of atoms and sub-atomic particles, known as quantum mechanics. The problem was that no one had ever combined these two areas of physics before. But that didn't deter Hawking. He set about developing a new way to force the physics of quantum mechanics to co-exist with Einstein's relativity within the intense gravity of a black hole. After months of work Hawking came up with a remarkable result. His equations were showing him that something was coming out of the black hole. This was supposed to be impossible. The one thing that everyone thought they knew about black holes was that things went in but nothing, not even light itself, could escape. But the more Hawking checked, the more he was convinced he was right. He could see radiation coming out of the black hole. Hawking then realised that this radiation (later called Hawking Radiation) would cause the black hole to evaporate and eventually disappear. Although Hawking's theories about black hole evaporation were revolutionary, they soon came to be widely accepted. But Hawking knew that this work had far more fundamental consequences. In 1976 he published a paper called 'The Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse'. In it he argued that it wasn't just the black hole that disappeared. All the information about everything that had ever been inside the black hole disappeared too. Are there limits to what science can know? In everyday life we're used to losing information but according to physics this isn't supposed to happen. Physics has it that information is never really lost, it just gets harder to find. Physicists cling on to this idea because it's their link with either the past or the future. If information is lost then science can never know the past or predict the future. There are limits to what science can know. For many years no one took much notice of Hawking's ideas until a fateful meeting in San Francisco. Hawking presented his ideas to some of the world's leading physicists. In the audience were Gerad t'Hooft and Leonard Susskind, two leading particle physicists. They were shocked. Both realised that Hawking's 'breakdown of predictability' applied not only to black holes but to all processes in physics. According to Susskind, if Hawking's ideas were correct then it would infect all physics, there would no longer be any direct link between cause and effect. Physics would become impotent. User: spam_vigilante Nov 16, 2008 4:48 AM






 
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