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Black Holes and Theology
Matter in Black Holes doesn't go to another universe

"Stephen Hawking, the paralyzed wheel-chair bound Cambridge physicist, says he was wrong in his pioneering theoretical research into black holes, those mysterious collapsed stars whose gravity is so intense that it pulls everything into them including light itself. He had originally maintained that matter pulled into a black hole was irretrievably lost--even if the black hole eventually breaks up--leaving absolutely nothing behind. He even put forth the hypothesis that matter pulled into a black hole might be spit out in some alternative universe, a concept employed ever since in science fiction stories and TV shows. New calculations he has developed, though, suggest that matter pulled into a black hole still exists in some "mangled form" and that it might sometimes explode out." Black holes have a bottom
This has implications for the Kalaam Cosmological Argument. Many times on debate boards I have read where our universe may have been the result of matter spilling into the void where our universe rests from another black hole. David Brin (one of my favorite sci-fi authors) made capital of this idea in one of the short stories that are contained in his book Otherness. If Hawking is right, does this take away the main avenue by which the universe could have sprung into existence out of nothing?

Comments

The Dawn Treader said…
Glad to see you posting on this most interesting development. I pulled this off an AP article about this announcement.

"After 29 years of thinking about it, Stephen Hawking says he was wrong about black holes.

Hawking, 62, said he no longer believes a 1980s theory that black holes might offer passage into another universe, a rival explanation for identifying where matter and energy go when consumed by a black hole.

Hawking now sides with particle physicists who have long insisted that any matter swallowed by a black hole can't just disappear but must eventually generate a specific output.

"There is no baby universe branching off (inside a black hole), as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe," Hawking said in a speech to about 800 physicists and other scientists from 50 countries. "I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.

... even better was the reaction in the crowd ...

"Hawking's new theory produced waves of skepticism and puzzlement from leading physics professors. Two in the front row — William Unruh of the University of British Columbia and Robert Wald of the University of Chicago — shrugged and shook their heads in disbelief as Hawking spoke.

"Hawking is completely revising his prior belief that what goes into a black hole is washed out. Now he believes that anything emitted from a black hole can be identifiable back to its source," said Wald, an expert on black holes. "He's running away from what we still believe."

Unruh said: "Part of the problem is he's providing so few details, so it's impossible to know whether we can believe these calculations. Stephen Hawking's not stupid, so we're going to take what he says seriously ... but the whole theory we're hearing seems extremely speculative."

So let me get this straight. The fact that black holes may not transport us into baby universes is now being viewed as extremely speculative by these erstwhile Hawking followers. Hmmm. Quite interesting indeed.
7/22/2004 02:34:00 PM
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