Stephen Hawking claims black holes could be portals to another universe

In a recent lecture at Harvard University, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking discussed the revolutionary theory that says black holes do not conserve physical information about the object that formed it or the material it absorbs.

The theory is known as the information paradox, and it goes against the scientific tenet that information on a system from one time could be used to figure out its state at any other time.

“It is said that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more true than in the case of black holes,” Hawking said, according to a Harvard news release. “Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers, but they are clearly matters of science fact.”

Initial theories on black hole said they retain almost no information on the stars from which they created. Only their mass, angular momentum and electrical charge were retained.

“Apart from these three properties, the black hole preserves no other details of the object that collapsed,” Hawking said. “For example, the final black hole state is independent of whether the body that collapsed was composed of matter or antimatter, or whether it was spherical or highly irregular.”

According to that theory, Hawking said, it appeared identical black holes might be established by an infinite quantity of configurations of matter. Quantum mechanics, however, has indicated the exact contrary by showing that black holes could only be created by particles with explicit wavelengths.

If the aspects of the bodies that form black holes are not forfeited, Hawking said, then “black holes contain a lot of information that is hidden from the outside world.”

How do these structures change?

We know black holes discharge particles, gradually lose mass, reduce in size and disappear, but the issue of what happens to the information they held remains unanswered.

“What happens to all the particles that fell into the black hole?” Hawking asked. “They can’t just emerge when the black hole disappears. The particles that come out of a black hole seem to be completely random and bear no relation to what fell in. It appears that the information about what fell in is lost, apart from the total amount of mass and the amount of rotation.”

If information is in fact lost, it would turn everything we know about the universe upside-down.

“For more than 200 years, we have believed in the science of determinism, that is that the laws of science determine the evolution of the universe,” Hawking said. “If information was lost in black holes, we wouldn’t be able to predict the future because the black hole could emit any collection of particles.”

“It might seem that it wouldn’t matter very much if we couldn’t predict what comes out of black holes — there aren’t any black holes near us,” he continued. “But it’s a matter of principle. If determinism — the predictability of the universe — breaks down in black holes, it could break down in other situations. Even worse, if determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either. The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity.”

At the conclusion of the lecture, Hawking answered three questions, including one on his Breakthrough Starshot project, which is dedicated to sending probes to the nearest solar system, Alpha Centauri.

“The solar system contains nowhere” that is “as favorable to human life as the Earth,” Hawking said. “The moon is small and has no atmosphere. Mars is also smaller than the Earth. It has a thin atmosphere, but it is not enough to breathe or protect us from cosmic radiation, so astronauts will have to live underground. To find somewhere like the Earth, we have to boldly go to the stars.”

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Image credit: NASA

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