alt Hacker NewsMy nitpick is with something the author said in passing about Hawking. Yes, around 1970 Hawking and the scientific community at large still used to believe nothing could escape a black hole, and between 1971 and 1973 Hawking along with Penrose and others expanded their evolving understanding and consequences of of Albert Einstein's breakthrough work.
But then Hawking argued back the opposite case, which in simple terms means that some things can, indeed, escape an event horizon. In fact, name dropping Hawking just to mention his views as they stood before his 1973 work, and his 1974 model of Hawking radiation seems dangerously incomplete journalistic reporting.
In 1974 Hawking formulated what we now know as Hawking Radiation, which is the *exact opposite* of what was previously believed about the impossibility of anything coming back from a black hole. Whilst still not conclusively proven as a physical fact, this did win him the Special Fundamental Physics Prize in 2013. specifically for his discovery of Hawking radiation from black holes and his deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.
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I find myself not agreeing with a lot of nitpicks, but this is a good one! The article says "Contrary to what Stephen Hawking argued, black holes are not inescapable prisons." But information escaping black holes is named after him! He definitely, in the full scope of his career, was perfectly agreeable to the idea of information escaping black holes.
You’re missing a big issue here… Hawking Radiation doesn’t escape from within the event horizon, and there’s no physical process preventing that. It’s radiation from the surface of the black hole, not the interior.
Please correct my understanding as I am not a scientist, but why do you assert that Hawking radiation "escapes" or "comes out of" a black hole? Nothing crosses the event horizon. Isn't it more correct to say that Hawking radiation is produced by the extreme warping of the spacetime very near the event horizon, and the black hole shrinks to conserve the energy? Black holes can also shrink as gravitational waves are produced, but we don't say that the waves "escape" the black hole.
Not sure I follow your comment exactly, perhaps I am misunderstanding it but Hawking radiation doesn't involve anything escaping a black hole.
The radiation never originates from within the event horizon. Furthermore the radiation itself does not encode any information about what fell into the black hole apart from the electric charge, angular momentum, and mass (all of which must remain conserved).