A Hole Lot Of Information

Prof Stephen Hawking said that black holes preserve information about the stuff that falls into them.

09:56 28 August 2015

Prof Stephen Hawking has contradicted earlier reports that the information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes are destroyed arguing that this violated laws of quantum physics. He added that the information may not even make it into the black hole at all and held on its boundary.

 

 "The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary - the event horizon," he told a conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Prof Marika Taylor, a theoretical physicist at the University of Southampton, told BBC News: "Einstein's theory says that matter gets sucked into the black hole, falling behind its event horizon.

 

"Holography seems to suggest that Einstein's picture of black holes isn't right. In particular, it's not clear that there is actually an 'inside' to black holes at all - matter which gets sucked in might get stuck at the event horizon and hang around as a hologram there."